Last fall, P&W co-sponsored a reading and workshop with poet Craig Santos Perez at University of California in Santa Cruz, where we have supported literary events since 2003. Perez also happens to be a past recipient of P&W’s California Writers Exchange Award, a prize that introduces promising California poets and writers to New York City’s literary community. We asked Perez how he approaches giving a reading.

Reading dos: Smile. Give thanks to the organizers, fellow performers, and the audience members. Drink water. Mark the pages you're going to read. Be prepared and organized. Be composed. Read your best work. Make eye contact with the audience. Share some background to the work. Read with passion.
Reading don’ts: Don't read too quietly. Don't shuffle through papers as if you just rolled out of bed. Don't say that you're going to read from your book that you don't like anymore because you wrote it a year ago. Don't talk for too long about the background of a poem. Don't drink water in the middle of a poem. Don't read drunk or high (unless that's part of your aesthetic). Don't go over time. Don't read too fast. Don't be hostile to the audience during Q&A. Do not not smile.

How you prepare for a reading: I prepare for a reading by figuring the best set list possible based on the time I'm given to perform, the venue, the organizer(s), the audience demographic, and my mood. I try to choose a mix of published and new work. I rehearse my performance beforehand, making sure I have the timing down. For my reading at UCSC, I also brought some gifts (free books and a can of SPAM) for the audience members who asked me questions during the Q&A.

Strangest comment you’ve received from an audience member: Last March I read at a social workers conference in Guam and was asked, by a much more experienced woman (as in thirty years older), "Are you married?"  I barely made it out of that room alive.

What’s your crowd-pleaser, and why it works: I have different poems that could ignite very different pleasures. For the pleasure of laughter: "Spam's Carbon Footprint." For the pleasure of emotional resonance: "from Aerial Roots" (from my second book). For the pleasure of resistance: "from Achiote" (from my first book).

But this is not always true because you can never read to the same crowd twice. Which is to say, all crowds are different and unpredictable and a writer has to be flexible, especially writers of color. Sometimes a poem that gives a certain kind of pleasure to one audience (let's say, composed of all native peoples) may not give the same pleasure (or any pleasure at all) to another audience (let's say, composed of all white peoples).

How giving a reading informs your writing and vice versa: If I read new work, I always find little edits I should make. So in that sense, it's good for revision. The more readings I've done over the years, the more connected I feel to the tradition of oral poetics and spoken word. I find myself using more oral poetry techniques in my work than ever before.

What you probably spent your R/W grant check on: I spend all the money I receive from reading gigs to buy more poetry books!

Major support for Readings/Workshops in California is provided by The James Irvine Foundation. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

Poet Traci Brimhall has appeared a number of times in our Recent Winners pages over the past few years. She has found notable success in the realm of contests, receiving awards including a fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing that took her to Madison for a year of teaching and writing; a grant from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund; the First Book Award from the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, for Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010); and the recently announced Barnard Women Poets Prize for her second collection, Our Lady of the Ruins. (The volume, selected by Carolyn Forché, will be published by W. W. Norton.) We asked Brimhall, who is currently a doctoral candidate at Western Michigan University, a few questions about how she approaches contests and what advice she has for writers considering competitions.

How many contests have you entered? How many did you enter before winning your first award?
I entered seventeen contests before I got the call that my first book, Rookery, won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. My records for my second book, Our Lady of the Ruins, are less accurate. Although I submitted to a handful of contests, the first response I received was the acceptance from the Barnard Prize, so I don't have the other contests listed on my submission spreadsheet. I believe it was seven or eight contests, plus some open reading periods.

So you’ve also submitted book manuscripts to publishers, outside of a competition?
I sent out Our Lady of the Ruins to a few open reading periods. I was certainly less aware of them when I first started sending out Rookery, but now that I've started screening for a couple of different book prizes, I think first book contests offer the advantage of limiting the pool of submissions. With open reading periods, a manuscript goes up against poets with two, three or ten books under their belt. That does not necessarily mean their work is stronger than yours, but the fish in that pond are certainly bigger.

What do you look for in a contest?
When I was still in my MFA program [at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York], I started paying attention to publishers. If a book took the top of my head off, I looked at the press. If I read a poem in a journal that made me clutch my pearls, I would look up that poet's bio and see if they'd published a book, and, if so, where. When I started looking at submitting my work to a contest, I'd already been paying attention to where poetry I admired was being published, and that's about all I looked for in a contest. Of course, I read many poets with brilliant work from presses that I knew wouldn't be interested in what I was doing, but on the whole, I just wanted to metaphorically sit at the table with poets who left me in awe when I read their poems.

How did you know your manuscripts were ready to go out?
Part of it is knowing when you're ready to break up with the work. With Rookery, I felt ready to move on, but I kept coming back to the manuscript to tweak poems or reorder. So I broke up with the manuscript a section at a time. I looked at the poems in each section and then wrote breakup poems where I tried to have it out with my obsessions so I could be done with them once and for all. Of course obsessions follow you wherever your work goes, but I did feel like I put my obsessions' belongings on the lawn and told them to get lost. Each breakup poem became the final poem in each section of the book. With Our Lady of the Ruins, I felt like that manuscript broke up with me. As much as I wanted—and still want—to keep writing those poems, the magic is gone. And who knows why. I was living in my car when I wrote most of them, and maybe the change in my life and my energy affected the way I was writing. Maybe I'd said all I needed to say. It was interesting to discover that the second manuscript functioned very differently than the first. Compiling and ordering one book didn't seem to teach me what I needed to know for the second. I hope I can be lucky enough to have my own work surprise and move me a third time.

How do you select individual pieces to submit to a competition—if this is ever something you do?
I've never had much luck with individual poem contests. I don't often submit to those because the contest fees are usually about fifteen dollars, and if I have a manuscript ready or one that's about to be ready, I'd rather spend twenty-five dollars sending that out. If I didn't have to budget in order to afford contest fees, I would probably submit to a lot more places, but fifteen dollars is four small lattes or a new book, and I'd rather have coffee and poetry than a small chance at winning a contest.

What is the most rewarding aspect of receiving an award?
The most satisfying thing lately has been the validation after a lot of discouraging feedback. I had a teacher tell me to throw away the poems in the second book and start over. I've had editors respond with a strong negative reaction to poems from the second book. One even said I didn't have any talent. Of course I wrote the poems anyway. I love those poems. I loved writing them. I look forward to reading them thirty more times in galleys and then beyond that. But it's hard to hear that poems I believed in were received poorly, and it was amazing to get the email from Saskia Hamilton at Barnard that said Carolyn Forché selected the book for the prize.

Have you ever had a negative experience as a result of winning a prize?
It's definitely surprised me that not everyone is happy for other people's good news. My good news has changed some friendships and even ruined one. Sometimes the good news doesn't feel worth it, because my greatest joy in poetry after writing a good poem is the community. Being a poet means that I share something in common with thousands of amazing strangers around the country, and whenever I travel for a reading or conference, I meet people who are passionate about the same things I am. A few years ago, I was told to think my competition is Shakespeare, Keats, and Dickinson, not anyone publishing in literary journals. If that's my competition, I don't ever have to worry about winning anything, I can run the race for the goddamned pleasure of it. And isn't the pleasure of it why people start writing in the first place?

What piece of advice do you have for writers looking to contests as a way to get their work into the world?
I really do think it's a great way to try and find a home for your work. Since judges change most years, you can always try again, whereas if an editor at a press says no, that's probably a fairly firm no. Many contests are judged blindly, often without acknowledgments pages, which means they're truly looking at just your poems. I also enjoy submitting in general, whether it's a manuscript or individual poems. I like the sense of possibility it gives me. The more you send out, the more times you will probably hear no, but then one day, you'll get that letter or that call that finally and joyfully says yes.

In the video below, vocalist Jennifer Lien performs Brimhall's poem "Aubade With a Broken Neck" from Rookery.

Quiddity, a literary journal out of Benedictine University in Springfield, Illinois, has launched its inaugural contest for a prose book trailer. The biennial competition is open to short films based on both unpublished manuscripts and published books of fiction or creative nonfiction, offering a five-hundred-dollar prize in each category.

Aside from the cash prize, Quiddity will also arrange to promote the winning trailers in the journal and on National Public Radio member station WUIS Springfield, as well as on the Web sites of both. The journal's prose editor David Logan and emerging novelist A. D. Carson will judge.

Authors should submit films of no longer than three minutes in the manuscript category, and publishers or presses should submit entries for published books; entry is free. Complete guidelines and entry forms are available on the Quiddity website.

Entries aren't due until December 10, but a look at Carson's sample trailer below might leave some writers wanting to carve out substantial time to get production just right, or assemble a crew—friends and colleagues are permitted to assist in the trailer's creation. Videos simply featuring authors reading do not qualify for this competition.

For Allison Amend, author of the story collection Things That Pass for Love and the novel Stations West, the road to publication has been a slightly bumpy one. It has required tenacity and perseverance, coupled with faith in her considerable talent. An Iowa MFA grad, with several prestigious credits, and for at least ten years, no books—she diligently wrote, placed articles and stories, applied for residencies and fellowships, freelanced, taught freshman comp, while her peers openly debated why Allison Amend had not yet published a book. She'd been a finalist or semi-finalist in so many first book award contests she'd stopped listing them on her resume.

In 2004, she finished a historical novel, Stations West. A version of the first chapter had appeared in One Story in 2002. And she landed a big-time agent, who shopped the book to over thirty publishing houses, at first big, and then small. Many editors liked it; some came tantalizingly close to saying yes, but ultimately none offered to publish it. Amend’s agent suggested she put her hard-wrought novel, as they say, in the drawer. Subsequently, she and the agent parted ways. But Amend persisted on her own, finally finding a publisher for her book, despite having no representation. The novel was published in 2010, to critical acclaim, and nominated for the $100,000 Sami Rohr prize. She's now represented by Terra Chalberg at the Susan Golomb Literary Agency. (Terra Chalberg answers reader-submitted questions in The Poets & Writers Guide to Literary Agents.)

Of all authors, Amend knows the pros and cons of working with an agent. In this video, she shares her experience. 

Write a scene in which two characters who are close (friends, relatives, a couple) are secretly angry at each other about something that has happened in the past. Decide what they are angry about before writing the scene but don't write about it directly. Instead, reveal the tension between them in the dialogue and in the actions involved in accomplishing a mundane task they are doing together, such as moving a couch, setting up a tent, making dinner, or painting a house.