The Story Prize has announced the 2009 shortlist for its annual twenty-thousand-dollar award. In the running for the honor, given for a short story collection published in the previous year, are National Book Award finalist Daniyal Mueenuddin for In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Norton), Victoria Patterson for Drift (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), and Wells Tower for Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

The shortlisted books, all of them debut collections, were selected from seventy-eight titles submitted by fifty-three presses. The winner will be announced on March 3 at the New School in New York City after a reading by all three finalists, and two runners up will then be awarded a five thousand dollar prize.

Past winners of the prize, given since 2004, are Edwidge Danticat for The Dew Breaker (Knopf), Patrick O'Keeffe for The Hill Road (Viking), Mary Gordon for The Stories of Mary Gordon (Pantheon), Jim Shepard for Like You'd Understand, Anyway (Knopf), and Tobias Wolff for Our Story Begins (Knopf).

In the video below, the title story of Tower's collection—a tale of Viking plunderers—is excerpted in an animated short.

Artist Trust has extended the deadline for its annual Grants for Artist Projects. Poets and prose writers now have until June 25 to submit entries for grants of up to fifteen hundred dollars to support specific literary endeavors. Grant applications will be available online in May.

The recipients will be selected by a panel of Washington state writers. Last year's eleven grantees were chosen from a pool of 167 entries by poets Samuel Green, the state poet laureate, and Dennis Held and fiction writers Adrianne Harun, Philip H. Red Eagle, and Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner.

The recipients—six women and five men—included four poets, five fiction writers, and two creative nonfiction writers. Five out of the eleven were residents of Seattle, King County, less than the average of the applicant pool across disciplines, which has been comprised of over 60 percent King County residents for the past several years. Most 2009 winners in literary arts received the full fifteen-hundred-dollar award.

In the video below, 2009 grantee Oliver de la Paz, who received funds to purchase a laptop and work on his poetry manuscript "Grace Equations," reads with New Jersey poet Evie Shockley.

Choosing the contest that would be a good fit for your book manuscript is a soft science. The partialities of the first readers, the potential of competing manuscripts, and the opinion of a judge are hardly predictable, but perhaps taking a look at the titles published by a sponsoring press could offer some insight into whether your writing would mesh with a publisher's catalogue. Below, we've taken a quick look at writers published by a few of the presses that have contests taking place in the coming months.

Ahsahta Press
Sawtooth Poetry Prize, judged by Terrance Hayes
Representative Poets: Sandra Alcosser, Dan Beachy-Quick, Brian Henry, Brenda Iijima, Rusty Morrison, Susan Tichy

Dream Horse Press
American Poetry Journal Book Prize, judged by J. P. Dancing Bear
Representative Poets: Amy Holman, Judith Skillman, Theodore Worozbyt

Ohio State University Press
Prize in Short Fiction
Representative Fiction Writers: Paul Eggers, Trudy Lewis, Gerald Shapiro, J. David Stevens

Omnidawn Publishing
Chapbook Competition, judged by Elizabeth Robinson
Representative Poets: Lyn Hejinian, Bin Ramke, Martha Ronk, Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop

Sarabande Books
Morton and McCarthy Prizes, judged by Amy Gerstler in poetry and Francine Prose in fiction
Representative Poets: Monica Ferrell, Kiki Petrosino, Jean Valentine
Representative Fiction Writers: David Crouse, Alyce Miller, Paul Yoon

Starcherone Books
Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, judged by Stacey Levine
Representative Fiction Writers: Peter Conners, Raymond Federman, Joshua Harmon, Janet Mitchell, Leslie Scalapino

Tupelo Press
Snowbound Series Chapbook Award, judged by Patricia Fargnoli
Representative Poets: Theodore Deppe, Jennifer Militello, G. C. Waldrep, Joshua Marie Wilkinson

In the video below (accompanied by eight others on YouTube), Omnidawn Publishing's Ken Keegan opens a reading of four more of the press's poets: Gillian Conoley, Richard Greenfield, Donald Revell, and Michelle Taransky.