Use the holiday weekend now upon us to prepare your manuscript for entry into one of this autumn's upcoming first book awards. Unpublished poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers all have an opportunity to submit debut works to competitions running from now through November 15, listed below.

For poets:
Academy of American Poets
Walt Whitman Award
open from September 15 through November 15

American Poetry Review
Honickman First Book Prize
open through October 31

Persea Books
Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize
open through November 2

Perugia Press
Poetry Prize
open through November 15

Silverfish Review Press
Gerald Cable Book Award
open through October 15

Yale University Press
Yale Series of Younger Poets
open from October 1 through November 15

(N.B. Poets, check out Katrina Vandenberg's article "Putting Your Poetry in Order, the Mix-Tape Strategy" for one writer's advice on how to organize a manuscript.)

For fiction writers:
University of Iowa Press
Short Fiction Awards
September 30

For writers in all genres:
Bread Loaf Writers' Conference
Bakeless Literary Publication Prizes
open from September 30 through November 1

Three writers have received 2009 Beyond Margins Awards from PEN American Center, the literary and human rights organization announced today. The winners are Uwem Akpan, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Lily Hoang.

Akpan, of Lagos, Nigeria, won for his debut short story collection Say You're One of Them (Little, Brown and Company). Herrera, who lives in Redlands, California, received the award for his poetry collection Half of the World in Light (University of Arizona Press), which also won the International Latino Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award this year. Hoang, of South Bend, Indiana, is honored for her novel Changing (Fairy Tale Review Press).

The writers join award alumni including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Alberto Ríos, Chris Abani, and Joy Harjo, to name four of the twenty-nine previous winners.

The Beyond Margins Awards are given by PEN each year to recognize works by writers of color published in the previous year. The prize is sponsored by PEN's Open Book Program, which promotes diversity within the American literary community and publishing industry. Then next deadline for publishers and agents to submit books for prize consideration is December 14.

The Rona Jaffe Foundation announced the winners of the organization's fifteenth annual Writers' Awards, devoted to the support of emerging women poets and prose writers. The recipients of the twenty-five-thousand-dollar grants are poets Vievee Francis, Janice N. Harrington, and Heidy Steidlmayer, fiction writers Lori Ostlund and Helen Phillips, and creative nonfiction writer Krista Bremer.

The winners were selected from a pool of nominations made by select writers, editors, and critics who remain anonymous. In September, the six writers will be honored at a reception in New York City, where the foundation says the honorees will be introduced to an array of industry professionals, including agents, publishers, and fellow writers, among them inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander.

Rona Jaffe, author of the best-selling novel The Best of Everything (Simon & Schuster, 1958) and other works of fiction, established the annual awards in 1995. Ninety-eight women have since received the grants, among them Lan Samantha Chang, ZZ Packer, Tracy K. Smith, and Rivka Galchen.

Beginning today, U.S. fiction writers who have published at least one book have the opportunity to apply for four-thousand-dollar fellowships from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. Five to eight writers will receive the awards, intended to enable them to set aside time for writing.

Isherwood, born in England in 1904, was a novelist and translator, friend and collaborator with writers such as W. H. Auden, and an activist for gay rights. U.K. publisher Jonathan Cape released Isherwood's first novel, All the Conspirators, in 1928. In the early 1930s, he lived in Berlin, during which time he wrote Berlin Stories, which was adapted into the musical Cabaret. Isherwood spent the latter part of his life in California, where he worked in film and television among other writers including Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Aldous Huxley. He died in 1986.

According to the organization's Web site, the Isherwood Foundation was established to grant funds to published fiction writers, as well as scholars of the late novelist. For the fiction grants, writers who have published a novel or short story collection may submit three copies of twenty to thirty pages of fiction, a curriculum vitae, and a letter of interest between today and October 1.

Before sending materials, entrants should visit the Web site to complete an online application and obtain an ID number. The organization is specific about how materials should be organized and mailed, so be sure to follow the instructions carefully.

Shenandoah, the literary magazine of Washington and Lee University, has extended the deadline for its occasional prize for a work honoring the life and fiction of Flannery O'Connor. Writers now have until October 31 to submit poems, fiction, or essays for a chance to win one thousand dollars and have their work included in the journal's sixtieth anniversary issue, dedicated to the prose maven from Georgia.

O'Connor, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, debuted with the novel Wise Blood (Harcourt, Brace) in 1952, and went on to publish the short story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find (Harcourt, Brace, 1955) and another novel, The Violent Bear It Away (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1960), before her death at thirty-nine, from complications of lupus, in 1964. Her story collection Everything That Rises Must Converge (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) was released posthumously in 1965. Her letters to fellow literary luminaries, as well as essays and reviews, have also been collected for publication over the years.

All entries to Shenandoah's contest will be considered for publication in the special issue, and there is no length restriction on pieces. Reviews, photographs, and works of visual art are also eligible for the contest.