As the release date approaches for the Allen Ginsberg biopic Howl, the poet's publisher, City Lights Books, is calling all "angelheaded hipsters" to submit their own trailers for the "notorious epic poem" that lends the film its name. The winner of the video contest will receive a movie poster, a Howl T-shirt, a "Howl if You Heart City Lights" bumper sticker, and a copy of Howl on Trial, the story of the 1957 obscenity trial that called into question the book's literary value.

Select trailers, which must be under ninety seconds long, will be posted on the City Lights YouTube page, and the winning work will also appear on Facebook. Entries are due on September 24, the major city release date for the film. More information about how to enter via e-mail is available on the City Lights Facebook page.

The trailer for the film, which stars James Franco as Ginsberg, is below.

The Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland, just a few miles north of Washington, D.C., home to writing workshops and resources for area writers also offers a number of reading fellowships to poets and prose writers in the early stages of their careers. Fellows receive an honorarium and a slot to read at Story/Stereo, a fusion of live music and literature in performance that was attended by roughly seven hundred listeners in its first year, 2009.

Story/Stereo's fall season opens tonight, featuring California-based poet Allison Benis White, whose poetry collection Self-Portrait With Crayon won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize in 2008, and fiction writer Aryn Kyle of New York City, author of a short story collection, Boys and Girls Like You and Me (Scribner, 2010), and a novel, The God of Animals (Scribner, 2007). Benis White and Kyle will be accompanied by musician John Davis at the event, which begins at 8 PM.

Other fellows selected for the fall are poet Jenny Browne (The Second Reason) and memoirist Debra Gwartney (Live Through This: A Mother’s Memoir of Runaway Daughters), who will read on October 8, and poet Alison Pelegrin (Big Muddy River of Stars) and fiction writer Doreen Baingana (Tropical Fish: Stories Out of Entebbe), set to perform on November 5.

The fellows are chosen by a panel of the center's board members, community representatives, and workshop leaders. In the first two seasons of the program, the winners were seven men and five women, half of whom had published only one book, and the other half two. Five fellows were writers of color.

Kyle Semmel, the center's publications and communications manager, says the organization is looking to bring in emerging writers from across the country. (Fellows who live more than 250 miles from Bethesda receive an honorarium of five hundred dollars and local writers receive half that amount.) The deadline for writers nationwide to submit work for spring 2011 consideration is September 30.

In the video below, tonight's featured writer Aryn Kyle reads the first part of an essay at the Franklin Park Reading Series in Brooklyn, New York, about her experience on a book tour (and dating another writer at the time). Subsequent scenes from the reading are posted on YouTube.

Now in their tenth year, the ReLit Awards honor independent poetry and fiction with a focus on celebrating ideas without the offer of a prize purse. The shortlists for this year's honors in poetry, short fiction, and the novel were announced earlier this week, highlighting titles published in 2009 by a variety of Canada-based small presses such as House of Anansi Press, Oberon Press, ECW Press, and Coach House Books.

The finalists in poetry are:
The Others Raisd in Me by Gregory Betts (Pedlar Press)
A Nice Place to Visit by Sky Gilbert (ECW Press)
Red Nest by Gillian Jerome (Nightwood Editions)
The Last House by Michael Kenyon (Brick Books)
Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip by Lisa Robertson (Coach House Books)
Paper Radio by Damian Rogers (ECW Press)
Always Die Before Your Mother by Patrick Woodcock (ECW Press)

The short fiction finalists are:
Sentimental Exorcisms by David Derry (Coach House Books) 
What Boys Like by Amy Jones (Biblioasis)
Men of Salt, Men of Earth by Matt Lennox (Oberon Press)
Fatted Calf Blues by Steven Mayoff (Turnstone Press)
Buying Cigarettes for the Dog by Stuart Ross (Freehand Books)
What We’re Made Of by Ryan Turner (Oberon Press)
The Moon of Letting Go by Richard Van Camp (Enfield & Wizenty)

The finalists in the novel are:
Overqualified by Joey Comeau (ECW Press)
After the Red Night by Christiane Frenette (Cormorant Books)
The Plight House by Jason Hrivnak (Pedlar Press)
The Beautiful Children by Michael Kenyon (Thistledown Press)
Wrong Bar by Nathaniel G. Moore (Tightrope Books)
Away From Everywhere by Chad Pelley (Breakwater Books)
Holding Still For As Long As Possible by Zoe Whittall (House of Anansi Press)

The winners will be announced on October 20 during the opening night of the Ottawa International Writers Festival in Ontario. Each will receive the ReLit ring, composed of four dials embossed with the alphabet.

The video below is a trailer for novel award finalist Zoe Whittall's shortlisted book.