Are you looking for a home for your debut poetry collection? Try submitting to the Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize from Conduit Books & Ephemera, which offers a prize of $1,500, publication, and 30 author copies of the book for the winning author.

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Submit a manuscript of 48 to 90 pages with a $25 entry fee by July 7. Bob Hicok will judge. Visit the website for complete guidelines.

Conduit Books & Ephemera was founded in 2018 in celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Conduit, a biannual literary journal of poetry and prose. Hicok sponsored the inaugural Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize, named after his grandmother-in-law, “a great supporter of young poets.” The annual prize goes to a poet writing in English who has yet to publish a full-length poetry collection. Those who submit are advised to familiarize themselves with Conduit, a magazine “which champions originality, intelligence, irreverence, and humanity.” The press also offers the Minds on Fire Open Book Prize, open to any poet writing in English and judged by Conduit’s editorial board. Submissions for the Minds on Fire prize open August 1.

“Crushes map life over with meaning and joy, and I’d always choose heartbreak over boredom,” writes Alexandra Molotkow in “Crush Fatigue,” an essay published in Real Life magazine, in which she discusses the effects amorous crushes have had on her life and psyche. The essay focuses on the word limerence, meaning the “condition of cognitive obsession,” and uses psychoanalytic theory to offer an understanding of the power of infatuations. Think back to your last crush and catalog the symptoms you remember experiencing. Write an essay that looks back on this time from a distance and consider what you’ve learned from your limerence. Would you be willing to fall deep into infatuation again?

In Nicole Krauss’s short story “Seeing Ershadi,” published in the New Yorker in 2018, a ballet dancer becomes obsessed with the actor Homayoun Ershadi, who plays Mr. Badii in the iconic Iranian film Taste of Cherry directed by Abbas Kiarostami. The story takes a turn when the protagonist travels to Japan with her dance company and sees Ershadi in a crowd, then follows him believing she must save the actor from the suicide he commits in the film. With a vividly convincing narrative voice, Krauss’s story embodies the impact great art can have, how a performance can haunt a viewer into seeing their life in a new light. This week, try writing a story that captures the relationship between a viewer and a work of art. What haunts your protagonist into reassessing something in their life?

In his fourth poetry collection, Chariot (Wave Books, 2023), Timothy Donnelly uses form to contain the expansiveness of philosophical and artistic inquiry. Each poem is confined to twenty lines and uses long, syntactically complex sentences to connect seemingly disparate things: from the Milky Way to the polluted green color of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, New York, and the blue of periwinkles and rainclouds to the ordinariness of a Staples office supply store. Inspired by Donnelly’s use of form and connection, flip through a few books from your shelves and write down all the nouns you encounter. Then write a twenty-line poem that attempts to connect these words as seamlessly as possible using your unique perspective.