Write an essay about the five things that scare you the most. Structure it with numbered section headings that include each thing, such as 1. Fire, 2. Death, 3. Failure, etc.

In his essay “Don’t Look Back” (Poets & Writers Magazine, November/December 2012), fiction writer Benjamin Percy argues against including backstory when writing short stories. “It’s almost always unnecessary," Percy writes. "A reader intuits the history of a character by observing that character act in the present.”  Choose a story you’ve written and delete all of the backstory that you’ve included. Then revise it by describing the main character and having that description convey the backstory instead.

Select one of your poems that needs revision and transform it into a physical object, such as an imaginary map, a collage, a drawing, or a shadow box (for inspiration, check out Joseph Cornell’s shadow boxes). 

Due to the recent effects of Hurricane Sandy, Ohio University Press has extended the deadline for the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize to November 15. The annual competition, which awards a $1,000 cash prize and publication by Ohio University Press, is given for a poetry collection.

Poets may submit previously unpublished manuscripts of sixty to ninety-five pages, along with a $25 entry fee, to Ohio University Press, 19 Circle Drive, The Ridges, Athens, Ohio 45701. The competition is open to poets who have published a full-length collection and those who have not. For more information and complete submission guidelines, visit the Ohio University Press website.

The annual prize is named for the poet Hollis Summers, who taught at Ohio University for many years and frequently wrote about the city of Athens in his poems. 

Poet Nick Norwood won last year’s prize for his third full-length collection, Gravel & Hawk, published this past April by Ohio University Press. In the podcast below from the PBS NewsHour program “Art Beat,” hear Nick read the poem “A.M.” from his winning collection.

Bard College has announced that author Brian Conn will be the recipient of the 2013 Bard Fiction Prize. Conn will receive a $30,000 cash award and a residency at Bard College during the spring 2013 semester. Conn received the prize for his debut book, The Fixed Stars, an experimental science fiction novel published by Fiction Collective 2 in 2010. As a writer-in-residence at Bard, located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, Conn will meet with students, give public readings, and continue to write.

“What won the respect of the Bard Fiction Prize judges was the remarkable way the weird, perplexing bleakness of the imagined society is firmly held in place by a narrative style at once bewildered and lucid—it has the air of a kind of deadpan tragedy, of the sort Kafka scared us with, and made us yearn for more," wrote the Bard Fiction Prize committee in a statement. “The Bard Fiction Prize has been anxious to celebrate innovation in the novel—and in Conn’s The Fixed Stars we found a perfect match of inventive fable with disquietingly radical storytelling. The prose sparkles with unique images, and the narrative itself is wonderful, at times wondrous even, and a highly original formal work, full of life.”

Conn’s fiction has appeared in both genre magazines and literary magazines, and The Fixed Stars was named one of Amazon’s ten best science fiction and fantasy books of 2010. In 2008, Conn cofounded the fiction journal Birkensnake at Brown University.

Established in 2001, the Bard Fiction Prize is given annually to an emerging writer under the age of forty for a work of innovative fiction. Last year Benjamin Hale received the prize for his novel The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (Twelve, 2011). The deadline for the 2014 prize is July 15, 2013. Visit the Bard website for guidelines.