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Since our founding in 1970, Poets & Writers has served as an information clearinghouse of all matters related to writing. While the range of inquiries has been broad, common themes have emerged over time. Our Top Topics for Writers addresses the most popular and pressing issues, including literary agents, copyright, MFA programs, and self-publishing.
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Find details about every creative writing competition—including poetry contests, short story competitions, essay contests, awards for novels, grants for translators, and more—that we’ve published in the Grants & Awards section of Poets & Writers Magazine during the past year. We carefully review the practices and policies of each contest before including it in the Writing Contests database, the most trusted resource for legitimate writing contests available anywhere.
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The Katonah Poetry Series in New York State is on the brink of shutting down; Maple Creek, Canada, hosts its twenty-first annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering; the Poet's Pad app for the iPad; Deepak Chopra's Muhammad gets an early e-release; and other news.
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.
One Story magazine hands out free short stories in Brooklyn, New York; Michel Houellebecq denies plagiarism claims; the big novel makes a comeback; the pleasures of reading multiple books at a time; and other news.
Tony Blair is the target of eggs and shoes at a book signing; a trolley tour of Pittsburgh's indie bookstores; this fall's line up of "heavyweight titles"; Oprah's Book Club will soon announce its next title; and other news.
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.
Sony announces a new line of e-readers; British poets unite to protest government spending cuts; BOA Editions appoints a new publisher; Toronto's poet laureate launches a new initiative; and other news.
"Marc" Sharpe, a friend of author Matthew Sharpe, discusses the themes in Sharpe's forthcoming novel You Were Wrong, published by Bloomsbury in August.