Genre: Poetry

Love’s Thorns

12.12.23

Love poems have a long and storied literary history. “The Love Song for Shu-Sin,” composed in ancient Mesopotamia for use in fertility rituals, is considered by some to be the oldest love poem found in text form. “Song of Songs” from the Old Testament of the Bible celebrates the romantic and sexual love between two people. In more recent times, poets have been testing the limits of the love poem. Nate Marshall’s “palindrome” imagines an estranged lover’s life rewound like a film as the subject becomes “unpregnant” and the speaker “unlearn[s]” her name. In Sharon Olds’s “The Flurry,” two parents discuss how to tell their children they’re getting a divorce. Think of a relationship in your life that resists easy categorization and write a love poem that attempts to capture this complexity. Whether the subject is the distant love of a parental figure or the one who got away, resist the easy associations that come with the emotion and dive into love’s thorny contradictions.

Eponymous Poem

12.5.23

The thirteen lines of the late Molly Brodak’s self-titled poem read: “I am a good man. / The amount of fear / I am ok with / is insane. / I love many people / who don’t love me. / I don’t actually know / if that is true. / This is love. / It is a mass of ice / melting, I can’t hold / it and I have nowhere / to put it down.” Through a series of declarative, zigzagging statements, the short poem manages to touch upon a handful of intense emotions—doubt, fear, uncertainty, desperation, and helplessness—all tied together by the eponymous title. This week write a short self-titled poem. How can you bring your own deeply personal responses to questions about your life and relationships under poetic scrutiny in a way that represents your individuality?

Upcoming Contest Deadlines

Don’t let 2023 pass you by without trying your luck at a writing contest! Prizes with a December 15 deadline include a weeklong residency at Millay Arts in Austerlitz, New York, and $1,000 (including $500 for a reading in New York City) for a poetry chapbook; $1,500 and publication for a short story; and $1,000 and publication for a poetry collection. Read on to learn more, and best of luck to you!

Center for Book Arts
Poetry Chapbook Contest

A prize of $500 and letterpress publication by the Center for Book Arts is given annually for a poetry chapbook. The winner will also receive 10 copies of their chapbook, an additional $500 to give a reading with the contest judge at the Center for Book Arts in New York City in fall 2024, and a free weeklong residency at Millay Arts in Austerlitz, New York, for their Wintertide Rustic Retreat. Manuscripts written in another language are accepted when accompanied by an English translation. Entry fee: $30.

Gival Press
Poetry Award

A prize of $1,000 and publication by Gival Press will be given biennially for a book of poetry. Beverly Burch will judge. Entry fee: $20.

Longleaf Press
Book Contest

A prize of $1,000, publication by Longleaf Press, and 25 author copies is given annually for a poetry collection. The winner will also be invited to give a virtual reading in early 2024. Roger Weingarten will judge. Entry fee: $27.

Story
Story Foundation Prize

A prize of $1,500 and publication in Story is given annually for a short story. Entry fee: $25.

Willow Books
Literature Awards

Three prizes of $1,000 each and publication by Willow Books are given annually for a book of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction by BIPOC writers. Entry fee: $25.

Visit the contest websites for complete guidelines, and check out the Grants & Awards database and Submission Calendar for more contests in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and translation.

Narratives of Borders and Migration

Caption: 

In this PEN America event from their 2022 World Voices Festival, authors Jean Guerrero, Omar El Akkad, Ousman Umar, and Yuri Herrera come together for a conversation about border and migrant narratives, the current global crises of displacement, and how literature tells the stories of those often ignored or hidden.

Know Thyself

11.28.23

How well do we know ourselves? Studies done by psychologists over the past several decades have demonstrated that people often process information about the world around them through cognitive biases. The way in which an event is remembered can then lead to biased thinking and decision-making. Positive memory biases cause one to remember events more favorably than they actually were and view their overall past with a rosy outlook, while negative memory biases often occur when recalling an emotional event. Write a poem that approaches one memory from two different cognitive biases, playing with the ways in which an event or situation might be remembered differently depending on how it was experienced. Does this multivalent approach allow you to expand your initial perceptions of what happened?

A Conversation With Mosab Abu Toha

Caption: 

Palestinian poet and scholar Mosab Abu Toha reads his poems and discusses his life as a writer in Gaza for this 2021 virtual event moderated by Refqa Abu-Remaileh and hosted by the Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance research collective and lecture series. The author of the award-winning book Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear (City Lights Books, 2022) was detained by Israeli Defense Forces while trying to leave Gaza after his home was bombed, and was later released.

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