Bloomington, New York's Codhill Press, whose "voice was conceived as lying at the intersection between spiritual, literary, and poetic thought," is open for entries to its fifth annual poetry chapbook contest, this year with a prize of one thousand dollars.

The winner, selected by Pauline Uchmanowicz, will also receive fifty copies of his or her chapbook, which will be distributed by SUNY Press—another recent development for Codhill.

The competition's finalists will also have their manuscripts considered for publication by the press, "dedicated to making beautifully crafted, carefully edited books." Images of selections from the Codhill catalogue, including 2009 chapbook contest winner Elizabeth Rees's Tilting Gravity, are viewable online.

To enter this year's contest, poets writing in English should send a manuscript of twenty to thirty pages with a twenty-five-dollar entry fee by November 30. Details on what to submit along with your poems are available on the Codhill Press Web site.

A few weeks ago the Canadian Writers’ Trust announced the finalists for its Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, which could have induced a bit of sibling rivalry, given two of the names on the five-strong shortlist. But authors Kathleen Winter and her younger brother, Michael, are far from feeling any familial animosity, according to Canada's the Star—in fact, they've mentioned, tongue-in-cheek, splitting the prize of twenty-five thousand Canadian dollars.

"In terms of anything like battle, it’s more of a tag team," Mr. Winter told the Star. "And the other people had better watch out."

Mr. Winter was shortlisted for The Death of Donna Whalen (Hamish Hamilton Canada). His sister, five years his senior, was nominated for her first novel, Annabel (House of Anansi Press), which is also up for the Scotiabank Giller Prize of fifty thousand Canadian dollars and the twenty-five-thousand-dollar Governor General’s Award for Fiction.

"I wouldn’t be a writer if I hadn’t seen Kathleen writing," says Mr. Winter, who published his first book, the story collection Creaking in Their Skins (Quarry Press, 1994), before his sister released her debut collection, boYs (Biblioasis, 2007). "When I was in university, Kathleen was already a writer. I don't know if there was much of a living in it, but she lived and breathed books and writing. She was always sending things out to publishers and magazines."

The other authors up for the Writers' Trust prize are Trevor Cole for Practical Jean (McClelland & Stewart), Emma Donoghue for Room (HarperCollins), and Michael Helm for Cities of Refuge (McClelland & Stewart). Next Wednesday, all of the finalists will give a reading at the International Festival of Authors, and the winner will be announced on November 2 at Toronto’s Isabel Bader Theatre.