Kundiman, the Asian American poets organization, announced the winner of its first annual book prize this weekend.

Janine Oshiro, a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop now teaching in Hawaii, won the two-thousand-dollar award for her manuscript "Pier," which will be published by Alice James Books. Oshiro, who has participated in Kundiman's annual writing retreat, will also be featured in a reading in New York City, where the organization is based.

The finalists for the prize, which was open to published and unpublished Asian American poets living in the United States, are Serena Chopra, April Naoko Heck, Kirun Kapur, Caroline Kim-Brown, Michelle Young-Mee Rhee, Ira Sukrungruang, R. A. Villanueva, Shawn Wen, and Lynn Xu.

Information about next year's prize will be available this fall in our Grants & Awards database, and on the Kundiman Web site.

Two women poets whose works "open the lock of language" and act as "X-rays of our delusions and mistaken perceptions" were honored last night as winners of the Griffin Poetry Prize. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin of Ireland won the international prize for her collection The Sun-fish and Toronto poet Karen Solie took the Canadian prize for Pigeon (House of Anansi Press).

They each received sixty-five thousand dollars in addition to ten thousand dollars awarded for giving a reading the night prior to the ceremony, during which Adrienne Rich was celebrated with a Lifetime Recognition Award.

Their books were selected by judges Anne Carson, Kathleen Jamie, and Carl Phillips from a shortlist that included John Glenday (Grain), Louise Glück (A Village Life), Kate Hall (The Certainty Dream), the late P. K. Page (Coal and Roses), and Susan Wicks (translation of Valérie Rouzeau's Cold Spring in Winter). Each shortlisted writer received a prize of ten thousand dollars.

"Among the greatest of Solie’s talents, evident throughout the poems of Pigeon," the judges remarked in their citation for the poet, "is an ability to see at once into and through our daily struggle, often thwarted by our very selves, toward something like an honorable life."

"We are in a shifting realm, both real and otherworldly," the judges said of Chuilleanáin's book. "The effect of her impressionistic style is like watching a photograph as it develops."

In the video below, Chuilleanáin reads a poem from The Sun-fish, "The Witch in the Wardrobe," which the judges noted for its "startling imagery" of "a ‘fluent pantry’, where ‘the silk scarves came flying at her face like a car wash.'"

Shakespeare and Company, the famously bohemian Paris bookstore established ninety-one years ago, recently announced its founding of a novella competition open exclusively to unpublished writers.

Entries have not yet opened for the biennial award, which includes a prize of ten thousand euros (approximately twelve thousand dollars), but writers can stay tuned to this blog or the bookstore's Web site for the latest.

Guidelines will be posted on Shakespeare and Company's Web site on June 20, the final day of the annual literary festival based at the store, which has since 1951 made its home on Paris's Left Bank. What we already know about the rules: Manuscripts should be twenty-thousand to thirty-thousand words, there will be a fee to enter, and the deadline for the initial submission period will be December 1.

The contest announcement comes on the heels of the bookstore's launch of Paris Magazine, a new embodiment of the sporadically published journal created by the bookstore's owner, George Whitman. The nonagenarian American literary advocate performed his own act of reincarnation when he opened the current Shakespeare and Company ten years after Sylvia Beach's original store was shuttered during World War II. The first issue of the new magazine, edited by Fatema Ahmed, formerly of Granta, features works by international talent including stories by French-Senegalese author Marie NDiaye and emerging American fiction writer Jesse Ball, and a translation of Apollinaire by Whitman's friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

The North Carolina Humanities Council recently announced a call for submissions to its Linda Flowers Literary Award competition. A prize of five hundred dollars and a residency at the Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities will be awarded to a writer—state residency is not required—for a work of poetry or prose that relates to the people and cultures of North Carolina.

The award is given in honor of Linda Flowers, a member of the council who authored the nonfiction book Throwed Away: Failures of Progress in Eastern North Carolina (University of Tennessee Press, 1993), which draws on her personal experiences with economic travesties occurring in rural regions of her home state. "We want to celebrate excellence in the humanities achieved by people like her," the council says on its Web site, emphasizing that it will be seeking out writers "who not only identify with our state, but who explore the promises, the problems, the experiences, the meanings in lives that have been shaped by North Carolina and its many cultures."

The deadline for submissions is August 15. For more information about the award, writers can visit the Web site or e-mail the council.

Among other organizations offering state grants this summer is Literary Arts, based in Portland, Oregon, which supports the state's writers with fellowships of $2,500 (women writers whose work touches on themes of race, class, physical disability, or sexual orientation are also eligible for a special award). The deadline for submissions is June 25.

Maryland authors who have published or will publish a book in 2010 can submit titles for Towson University's Prize for Literature until June 15, and Washington State writers can enter their work for a grant from Seattle-based Artist Trust until June 25.

In the video below, North Carolina poet laureate Cathy Smith Bowers reads a poem from her most recent book, The Candle I Hold Up to See You (Iris Press, 2009), touching on the private, metaphorical language taught her by her mother.