Oregon-based High Desert Journal is accepting entries for its Obsidian Prize for poetry inspired by the West. All forms are accepted, from "free verse to haiku to cowboy," and the winning poet, selected by Paulann Petersen, will receive one thousand dollars and publication in the magazine.

Submissions are accepted only via Submishmash, and the entry fee for three poems totaling no more than one hundred lines is twelve dollars. The deadline is August 15.

The journal will administer a similar prize for fiction in the fall. The winner of last year's fiction prize was Joe Wilkins for "Enough of Me," selected by Gretel Ehrlich, which was published in the latest issue of High Desert Journal.

In the video below, poetry judge Paulann Petersen's poem "Replenish" is set to music by Portland, Oregon, ensemble Flash Choir.

The Poetry Center in Paterson, New Jersey, has announced the winner of the 2011 Paterson Fiction Prize, given annually for a novel or short story collection. Danielle Evans won the one-thousand-dollar prize for her short story collection, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (Riverhead Books), which earlier this year was longlisted for the Story Prize and given an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award.

Evans's debut book takes its title from "The Bridge Poem" by Kate Rushin (The Black Back-Ups, Firebrand Books, 1993), whose meditation on the phenomenon of one group's "translating" their lives for the benefit of another group influenced the themes of Your Own Fool Self. "Right now we have a moment with a lot of language about post-racialism and yet a lot of evidence that we are clearly not post-anything," Evans told the Washington Post, "and there's a lot of room for complication, contradiction, and ambiguity, which is good territory for fiction."

Evans received the prize over fellow Iowa Writers' Workshop alumna (and current Workshop director) Lan Samantha Chang's All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost (W. W. Norton), Deborah Eisenberg's The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (Picador), Patricia Engel's Vida (Black Cat), Lily King's Father of the Rain (Atlantic Monthly Press), Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered (Riverhead Books), and Cynthia Ozick's Foreign Bodies (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

In the video below, novelist Tayari Jones praises Evans's book. (And in the video here, the Washington Post's video book reviewer Ron Charles—who recently won an award of his own—takes on Evans's collection.)