Mary Robison, author of four short story collections, has been named the latest winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, given to recognize significant work the form.

The prize, which was last awarded in 2008 to Amy Hempel, is typically given annually and carries an award of thirty
thousand dollars.

A native of Washington, D.C., who now teaches at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Robison was commended by judges Andrea Barrett, Hempel, and Jayne Anne Phillips for her stories' "lean, cool ferocity and their wry takes on people in pivotal moments." Her story collections are Days (Knopf, 1979), An Amateur’s Guide to the Night (Random House, 1983), Believe Them (Knopf, 1988), and Tell Me: Thirty Stories (Counterpoint, 2002), and Robison has also published five novels including Oh! (Knopf, 1981), Why Did I Ever (Counterpoint, 2001), and One D.O.A., One on the Way (Counterpoint, 2009).  

Previous winners of the Rea Award, founded in 1986 by writer and "passionate reader" Michael Rea, include Cynthia Ozick, Tobias Wolff, Eudora Welty, Andre Dubus, and Antonya Nelson.

"I write a little every day, without hope and without despair," said Danish author Isak Dinesen.

Hers was one of twenty quotes by writers on writing selected by Crazyhorse from readers' nominations to grace the journal's Web site. Contest participants who submitted winning entries will receive a subscription to the magazine, which turned fifty this year.

Below are a few selections from the picks of the judges—the editorial interns—which will appear in a graphic on the journal's home page. Currently, the Web site is showcasing quotes from the latest issue, including works by winners of the Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize and the Crazyhorse Prize—Kary Wayson and Elizabeth Oness.

"If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up."—Hunter S. Thompson

"All I am is the trick of words writing themselves."
—Anne Sexton

"Write, damn you! What else are you good for?"
—James Joyce

"I could claim any number of high-flown reasons for writing, just as you can explain certain dogs behavior... But maybe, it’s that they’re dog, and that’s what dogs do."
—Amy Hempel

"Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail."
—Susan Sontag

As a response an observed increase in the popularity of the form, the Dublin Review of Books has launched a one-time flash fiction contest.

The free, online magazine of book reviews and news will publish three short short stories selected by a DRB editor and Irish fiction writers James Ryan and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, and award the author of the winning work a prize of one thousand euros (approximately thirteen hundred dollars).

Writers from anywhere in the world working in English may enter up to three stories of no more than five hundred words each, either via the online form or e-mail, by June 1. A ten-euro entry fee (approximately thirteen dollars), which the DRB will accept through PayPal, is required.

Judge James Ryan is the author of novels South of the Border (Lilliput Press, 2008), Seeds of Doubt (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001), and Home from England (Phoenix House, 1995). To read a short story by Ryan, check out issue seven of the Dublin Review (no relation to DRB).

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, who has studied medieval literature and oral tradition and has a doctorate in Irish folklore, has published short story collections including The Pale Gold of Alaska (Blackstaff Press, 2000) and Blood and Water (Attic Press, 1988), and the novel The Dancers Dancing (Blackstaff Press, 1999), which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize.

Also holding short short story contests this spring are the Bridport Arts Centre in England and New Millennium Writings in the United States, both with deadlines in June.

The National Book Foundation (NBF) announced today that among the winners of its Innovations in Reading Prizes is Cellpoems, a poetry journal distributed via text message. The journal, which accepts submissions online and, naturally, via text message, will receive a twenty-five-hundred-dollar grant to continue, in the words of NBF's director of programs Leslie Shipman, "using technology in a surprising and innovative way to make poetry a part of people’s daily lives."

Details on how to submit and how to receive the journal—which readers can also follow on Twitter—are available on the Cellpoems Web site.

Other 2010 Innovations in Reading winners are 826 Valencia, the San Francisco branch of 826 National's network of nonprofit literary centers; Free Minds Book Club and Writing Workshop for teenage boys incarcerated in Washington, D.C.; Mount Olive Baptist Church in rural South Carolina, which established a community children's library; and United Through Reading, a program assists parents who are separated from their children in creating DVD recordings of storybook readings.