The Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Project, a memorial foundation honoring the late poet Lexi Rudnitsky, is once again teaming with New York City indie press Persea Books to hold a poetry book prize. Like the five-year-old prize for a first book, the new Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor's Choice Award offers publication of a poetry collection and one thousand dollars, but this prize will be given to a U.S. poet who has published at least one full-length book of poetry in an edition of over five hundred copies.

The winning poet will also receive a two- to four-week residency at the Anderson Center artist retreat in Red Wing, Minnesota. The length of the stay is up to the winner, but "the center loves it when residents come for the full month," says Persea's poetry editor and contest judge Gabriel Fried.

When asked what he is looking for in a submission, Fried said, "I really don't have a pre-articulated sense of what sort of poetry will win, except that it should be unforgettable, striking in the ways it accomplishes what it sets out to do….I honestly don't feel predisposed toward a particular poetics, just toward the realization of poetic ambition."

Fried will select the winner with the help of an advisory committee from the Poetry Project, and the announcement will be made in April.

Finishing Line Press has extended the deadline of its New Women's Voices Chapbook Competition. Women poets who have not published a book-length collection now have until February 28 to submit manuscripts of up to twenty-six pages.

The winner will receive one thousand dollars and publication of her chapbook. Contest judge Leah Maines, the press's senior editor and author of the first book in the New Women's Voices series, Looking to the East With Western Eyes, will also select ten finalists for publication. 

Last year's winner was University of Wisconsin literature professor Cherene Sherrard for Mistress, Reclining, forthcoming in April. A list of all past winners' and finalists' books released as part of the New Women's Voices series—seventy-six chapbooks in all—is posted on the Finishing Line Press Web site. 

Twenty-two books published four decades ago have made the longlist for the Lost Man Booker Prize. The third celebratory prize in the history of the Bookers—following the twenty-fifth anniversary Booker of Bookers and the fortieth anniversary Best of the Booker—will recognize a novel by a U.K. writer published in 1970, the year before the award guidelines changed their scope and made many just-released titles ineligible for prize consideration.

From the longlist, poet Tobias Hill, broadcaster Katie Derham, and journalist Rachel Cooke—all born in or around 1970—will select a shortlist of six titles, which will be announced in March. A public vote will then determine the winning book.

The semifinalists and their novels, available most recently from the publishers noted below, are:
The Hand Reared Boy (Souvenir Press) by Brian Aldiss
A Little Of What You Fancy? (Penguin) by H. E. Bates
The Birds on The Trees (Virago Press) by Nina Bawden
A Place in England (Sceptre) by Lord Melvyn Bragg
Down All The Days (Vintage) by Christy Brown
Bomber (HarperCollins) by Len Deighton
Troubles (Phoenix) by J. G. Farrell
The Circle (Faber Finds) by Elaine Feinstein
The Bay of Noon (Virago Press) by Shirley Hazzard
A Clubbable Woman (HarperCollins) by Reginald Hill
I'm the King of the Castle (Penguin) by Susan Hill
A Domestic Animal (Faber Finds) by Francis King
The Fire Dwellers (Virago Press) by Margaret Laurence
Out of the Shelter (Penguin) by David Lodge
A Fairly Honourable Defeat (Vintage) by Iris Murdoch
Fireflies (Penguin) by Shiva Naipaul
Master and Commander (HarperCollins) by Patrick O'Brian
Head to Toe (Methuen Publishing) by Joe Orton
Fire From Heaven (Arrow Books) by Mary Renault
A Guilty Thing Surprised (Arrow Books) by Ruth Rendell
The Driver's Seat (Penguin Classics) by Muriel Spark
The Vivisector (Vintage) by Patrick White