Find details about every creative writing competition—including poetry contests, short story competitions, essay contests, awards for novels, grants for translators, and more—that we’ve published in the Grants & Awards section of Poets & Writers Magazine during the past year. We carefully review the practices and policies of each contest before including it in the Writing Contests database, the most trusted resource for legitimate writing contests available anywhere.
Find a home for your poems, stories, essays, and reviews by researching the publications vetted by our editorial staff. In the Literary Magazines database you’ll find editorial policies, submission guidelines, contact information—everything you need to know before submitting your work to the publications that share your vision for your work.
Whether you’re pursuing the publication of your first book or your fifth, use the Small Presses database to research potential publishers, including submission guidelines, tips from the editors, contact information, and more.
Research more than one hundred agents who represent poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers, plus details about the kinds of books they’re interested in representing, their clients, and the best way to contact them.
Find publishers ready to read your work now with our Open Reading Periods page, a continually updated resource listing all the literary magazines and small presses currently open for submissions.
Since our founding in 1970, Poets & Writers has served as an information clearinghouse of all matters related to writing. While the range of inquiries has been broad, common themes have emerged over time. Our Top Topics for Writers addresses the most popular and pressing issues, including literary agents, copyright, MFA programs, and self-publishing.
Our series of subject-based handbooks (PDF format; $4.99 each) provide information and advice from authors, literary agents, editors, and publishers. Now available: The Poets & Writers Guide to Publicity and Promotion, The Poets & Writers Guide to the Book Deal, The Poets & Writers Guide to Literary Agents, The Poets & Writers Guide to MFA Programs, and The Poets & Writers Guide to Writing Contests.
Poets & Writers lists readings, workshops, and other literary events held in cities across the country. Whether you are an author on book tour or the curator of a reading series, the Literary Events Calendar can help you find your audience.
Research newspapers, magazines, websites, and other publications that consistently publish book reviews using the Review Outlets database, which includes information about publishing schedules, submission guidelines, fees, and more.
Well over ten thousand poets and writers maintain listings in this essential resource for writers interested in connecting with their peers, as well as editors, agents, and reading series coordinators looking for authors. Apply today to join the growing community of writers who stay in touch and informed using the Poets & Writers Directory.
Since our founding in 1970, Poets & Writers has served as an information clearinghouse of all matters related to writing. While the range of inquiries has been broad, common themes have emerged over time. Our Top Topics for Writers addresses the most popular and pressing issues, including literary agents, copyright, MFA programs, and self-publishing.
Find a writers group to join or create your own with Poets & Writers Groups. Everything you need to connect, communicate, and collaborate with other poets and writers—all in one place.
Well over ten thousand poets and writers maintain listings in this essential resource for writers interested in connecting with their peers, as well as editors, agents, and reading series coordinators looking for authors. Apply today to join the growing community of writers who stay in touch and informed using the Poets & Writers Directory.
Find information about more than two hundred full- and low-residency programs in creative writing in our MFA Programs database, which includes details about deadlines, funding, class size, core faculty, and more. Also included is information about more than fifty MA and PhD programs.
Whether you are looking to meet up with fellow writers, agents, and editors, or trying to find the perfect environment to fuel your writing practice, the Conferences & Residencies is the essential resource for information about well over three hundred writing conferences, writers residencies, and literary festivals around the world.
Poets & Writers lists readings, workshops, and other literary events held in cities across the country. Whether you are an author on book tour or the curator of a reading series, the Literary Events Calendar can help you find your audience.
Discover historical sites, independent bookstores, literary archives, writing centers, and writers spaces in cities across the country using the Literary Places database—the best starting point for any literary journey, whether it’s for research or inspiration.
Establish new connections and enjoy the company of your peers using our searchable databases of MFA programs and writers retreats, apply to be included in our directory of writers, and more.
Each year the Readings & Workshops program provides support to hundreds of writers participating in literary readings and conducting writing workshops. Learn more about this program, our special events, projects, and supporters, and how to contact us.
The Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award introduces emerging writers to the New York City literary community, providing them with a network for professional advancement.
Find information about how Poets & Writers provides support to hundreds of writers participating in literary readings and conducting writing workshops.
Bring the literary world to your door—at half the newsstand price. Available in print and digital editions, Poets & Writers Magazine is a must-have for writers who are serious about their craft.
View the covers and contents of every issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, from the current edition all the way back to the first black-and-white issue in 1987.
Find details about every creative writing competition—including poetry contests, short story competitions, essay contests, awards for novels, grants for translators, and more—that we’ve published in the Grants & Awards section of Poets & Writers Magazine during the past year. We carefully review the practices and policies of each contest before including it in the Writing Contests database, the most trusted resource for legitimate writing contests available anywhere.
Every day the editors of Poets & Writers Magazine scan the headlines—publishing reports, literary dispatches, academic announcements, and more—for all the news that creative writers need to know.
In our weekly series of craft essays, some of the best and brightest minds in contemporary literature explore their craft in compact form, articulating their thoughts about creative obsessions and curiosities in a working notebook of lessons about the art of writing.
The Time Is Now offers weekly writing prompts in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction to help you stay committed to your writing practice throughout the year. Sign up to get The Time Is Now, as well as a weekly book recommendation for guidance and inspiration, delivered to your inbox.
Ads in Poets & Writers Magazine and on pw.org are the best ways to reach a readership of serious poets and literary prose writers. Our audience trusts our editorial content and looks to it, and to relevant advertising, for information and guidance.
Start, renew, or give a subscription to Poets & Writers Magazine; change your address; check your account; pay your bill;
report a missed issue; contact us.
Poets & Writers is pleased to provide free subscriptions to Poets & Writers Magazine to award-winning young writers and to high school creative writing teachers for use in their classrooms.
Read select articles from the award-winning magazine and consult the most comprehensive listing of literary grants and awards, deadlines, and prizewinners available in print.
Linda Gray Sexton's memoir Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton, originally published in 1994 by Little, Brown, was just rereleased in paperback by Counterpoint Press. Anne Sexton herself wrote a play titled Mercy Street, and a posthumous book of poetry, 45 Mercy Street, was published in 1976, two years after she committed suicide. In 1986, Peter Gabriel released his fifth album, So, which includes the song "Mercy Street," dedicated to the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.
Yesterday the Lambda Literary Foundation announced the finalists for its twenty-third annual "Lammy" literary awards. Books are considered on the basis of their being authored by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender writers or depicting LGBT characters.
Below are the contenders for prizes in poetry, fiction, and debut fiction, selected from a record pool of entries: 520 titles submitted by 230 publishers. The full lists of finalists in the additional Lammy categories, including biography, anthology, and erotica, are available on the Lambda Literary Foundation Web site.
Gay Poetry darkacre by Greg Hewett (Coffee House Press) then, we were still living by Michael Klein (GenPop Books) Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems by James Schuyler (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Pleasure by Brian Teare (Ahsahta Press) The Salt Ecstasies: Poems by James L. White (Graywolf Press)
Lesbian Poetry Money for Sunsets by Elizabeth J. Colen (Steel Toe Books) The Inquisition Yours by Jen Currin (Coach House Books) The Sensual World Re-emerges by Eleanor Lerman (Sarabande Books) White Shirt by Laurie MacFayden (Frontenac House) The Nights Also by Anna Swanson (Tightrope Books)
Gay Debut Fiction XOXO Hayden by Chris Corkum (P. D. Publishing) Probation by Tom Mendicino (Kensington Publishing) Bob the Book by David Pratt (Chelsea Station Editions) The Palisades by Tom Schabarum (Cascadia Publishing) Passes Through by Rob Stephenson (University of Alabama Press)
Lesbian Debut Fiction Alcestis by Katharine Beutner (Soho Press) Sub Rosa by Amber Dawn (Arsenal Pulp Press) Fall Asleep Forgetting by Georgeann Packard (The Permanent Press) The More I Owe You by Michael Sledge (Counterpoint Press) One More Stop by Lois Walden (Arcadia Books)
Bisexual Fiction Fall Asleep Forgetting by Georgeann Packard (The Permanent Press) If You Follow Me by Malena Watrous (Harper Perennial) Krakow Melt by Daniel Allen Cox (Arsenal Pulp Press) The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet by Myrlin A. Hermes (Harper Perennial) Pride/Prejudice: A Novel of Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth Bennet, and Their Forbidden Lovers by Ann Herendeen (Harper Paperbacks)
Gay Fiction By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Children of the Sun by Max Schaefer (Soft Skull) Consolation by Jonathan Strong (Pressed Wafer) The Silver Hearted by David McConnell (Alyson Books) Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett (Doubleday)
Lesbian Fiction Big Bang Symphony by Lucy Jane Bledsoe (University of Wisconsin Press) Fifth Born II: The Hundredth Turtle by Zelda Lockhart (LaVenson Press) Holding Still for as Long as Possible by Zoe Whittall (House of Anansi), also a finalist in the transgender fiction category Homeschooling by Carol Guess (PS Publishing) Inferno by Eileen Myles (OR Books)
The winners will be honored at a gala held at the School of Visual Arts in New York City on May 26.
In the video below, Lesbian Fiction finalist Eileen Myles discusses her nominated book.
The author of five poetry collections, including Ghost in a Red Hat, which was just published by W. W. Norton, Rosanna Warren reads “Aftermath,” one in a series of elegies she wrote the for poet Deborah Tall, who died of breast cancer in 2006. This reading took place on March 7, 2011 at Nyack College.
The documentary Behind Those Books, written by Kaven Brown, directed by Mills Miller, and featuring interviews with Terry McMillan, Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, and Kevin Powell, is billed as "the first and only comprehensive documentation, on film, of the urban literature genre, giving viewers a raw and uncut look inside the emerging industry." It will premiere May 28 at Tribeca Cinemas in New York City.
In this rather raw clip, Nick Demske responds to the political situation in Wisconsin, where tens of thousands of protesters—some of them on tractors—descended on the state Capitol over the weekend, with a poem.
Choose a poem that you are in the process of revising. Draw a map of that poem, paying attention to the details of its landscape, its realities and abstractions, its landmarks, the spacial relationships among its features. Use the map to guide a revision of the initial work.
Last night the National Book Critics Circle celebrated its favorite books of 2010, announcing National Book Critics Circle Award winners in poetry, fiction, and autobiography. C. D. Wright took home the prize in poetry forOne With Others (Copper Canyon), a work of verse journalism investigating the Civil Rights movement in the poet's native Arkansas.
"She’s developed a new form, if not a new genre," says NBCC board member Craig Morgan Teicher in a review of Wright's book, "that allows for a new
blending of fact and feeling, one which could help us tell our stories
going forward, if only we’ll let it school us."
In fiction, Jennifer Egan won in fiction for A Visit From the Goon Squad (Knopf). Board member Collette Bancroft says of Egan's time-leaping novel-in-stories, "A Visit From the Goon Squad wraps big themes—art and its
relationship with technology, the fluid nature of the self, love and its
loss—in stories with a satiric edge, believable but never predictable
characters, and a range of styles masterfully rendered."
In autobiography, Darin Strauss won for Half a Life (McSweeney's Books), a memoir of the author's life after a devastating accident involving one of his high school classmates. "What might have been exploitative instead feels important, and dearly won," says board member Karen Long.
In the video below, filmed last week, Wright reads from her winning volume at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.
Abe's Penny, a "micro-magazine" that presents stories and poems serialized on postcards along with images, is looking for poems to accompany four series of photographs it will present in a Miami exhibition this April. The magazine will accept entries live at the New World School of the Arts' ArtSeen gallery on April 2, opening night of its exhibition featuring works by photographers Robby Campbell, Francie Bishop Good, Lee Materazzi, and Samantha Salzinger (and, incidentally, poetry readings by Gabby Calvocoressi and Denise Duhamel).
Writers will also have to opportunity to submit work during poetry and music events promoting the exhibition's run, which ends on April 26. (The show is held in conjunction with the new, monthlong, O, Miami literary festival, and information about all events is available on the festival Web site.) At the end of April, Abe's Penny will select one collaboration to publish as an issue of its magazine, which will be published piece-by-piece over the course of four weeks.
Writers visiting the gallery are invited to pen their poetry in "utopian but functional" workspaces created by New World School students. In order to offer writers more time to interact with the photography, the gallery will open to poets one hour prior to each scheduled event. There is no fee to submit poems, and the events are free and open to the public.
Poet, novelist, and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu recently delivered a lecture about art, the Internet, and his latest book, The Poetry Lesson (Princeton University Press, 2010), at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. In this clip he talks about how Google is killing creativity and what Facebook is "really" all about.
Choose a clichéd phrase ("fit as a fiddle," "think out of the box," "running on empty," etc.) and turn it around. Use the new meaning created by this reversal to fuel a poetic meditation.
