The Poetry Foundation in Chicago, supporter of emerging young poets through its Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships, has announced that it will once again administer the Emily Dickinson First Book Award, an occasional prize for unpublished poets of at least forty years of age.

The competition, which awards ten thousand dollars and book publication, is open to American poets who have not published a full-length collection of verse.

Graywolf Press will publish the winning manuscript, which must be forty-eight to eighty pages long and never before submitted for this particular prize. The Minneapolis-based indie also published the two previous winners' collections, Everything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005 by the late Landis Everson and The King's Question by Brian Culhane.

The Poetry Foundation will begin accepting entries on January 16, and the competition will close on February 17. The winning poet will be notified before the close of National Poetry Month on April 30.

For complete guidelines, visit the contest web page.

Write a story that opens with your main character doing something that is completely antithetical to his or her personality. Let the story be about how this character came to do what he or she did.

Once again in 2012 Amazon will partner with Penguin Group to hold a contest for early-career novelists.

The two media giants announced last week that the fifth annual Breakthrough Novel Award competition, which offers an advance of fifteen thousand dollars and a publication contract with Penguin, will open on January 23 and close to entries on February 5—or once five thousand entries have been submitted in the general fiction category (a young adult competition is being offered as well).

The assessment process for the contest is five-tiered. First, Amazon editors will select one thousand manuscripts from the total pool, and, with the assistance of seasoned Amazon reviewers, will whittle that group down to two hundred fifty. Those that make the cut will be reviewed and rated by Publishers Weekly reviewers, and the most favored fifty will be handed off to editors at Penguin, who will select three finalists.

The shortlisted writers will have their manuscripts reviewed by a panel that includes editor Anne Sowards, literary agent Donald Maass, and thriller author Linda Fairstein, and Amazon users will then be able to vote for a winner based on the reviews and manuscript excerpts. Amazon will reveal the winner on June 16.

For contest guidelines and the fine print, visit the Amazon website.

Look back through the poems you've written this year and make a list of images or words you've repeated. This list will guide you toward identifying your poetic obsessions. Choose one of your poetic obsessions and write a poem that fully explores it.

Suzanne Lummis, poet and director of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival, blogs about the P&W-supported Lummis Day Festival in Los Angeles.

Now and then at a reading, you nab the whole audience. When the show is over they rush up to you, wild with joy. But other times, it's that reading where just eleven people show up, only one book is bought, and you drive home grumpy. Then much later, someone comes up to you at an event, kind of shy, and tells you how years back she'd been in a sparse audience at some now defunct café, and how that reading persuaded her to give up her career in advertising, which she despised, and become a writer instead. Now she's happy. And, you think, "Ah, so that's whom that evening was for."

On especially felicitous occasions, you get both, the audience and the person who walks away changed. Take last year's Lummis Day for example. The kick-off poetry reading for the annual gala, also know as the Festival of Northeast Los Angeles, has never failed to please a crowd. And, it does draw a crowd—as many as can fit comfortably into the spacious garden in front of El Alisal, the name Charles Lummis gave to the idiosyncratic house he built with river rock around the turn of the nineteenth century. Eliot Sekular, a champion of Northeast Los Angeles, founded Lummis Day, naming it after my grandfather, who Southwest history buffs remember for his advocacy on behalf of Native American and Spanish California culture. So every first Sunday of June, folks drive across the city, or walk over from around the corner, always in high spirits. It is after all, not only a lively reading with a social gathering afterwards, but the beginning of a daylong party, with bands, folkloric dances, and other entertainments.

Last year, in my opening comments, I mentioned that I felt lucky that my parents had been poetry readers, and therefore I'd never in my life lived in a house that did not have poetry on the bookshelves. Steve Kowit then delighted fiesta-goers with his humor and embracing energy, followed by Mariano Zara, who read a moving personal piece, and poetry-loving actor Dale Raoul (Maxine Fortenberry in True Blood), who presented selections from Poems of the American West. While the assembled gathered in the reception area for a "noise" (Lummis disdained the term "salon" and was bored by "party"), a fellow approached me with a title he'd just purchased from the book table, Poems of the American West.  He was beaming. "Could I please write 'For Alfredo?'"  I asked him to tell me a little about himself so I could personalize the dedication. "Oh, it's for him," he said, and pointed to a stroller holding a boy of about two. Then his wife appeared by his side. And I was, well... I don't want to get sentimental. The English have a word for it—I was chuffed. This little boy would grow up in a house with poetry... it's not everything, but it seems to have the makings of a promising start. 

Photo: Suzanne Lummis. Credit: Penelope Torribio.

Major support for Readings/Workshops in California is provided by The James Irvine Foundation. Additional support comes from Friends of Poets & Writers.

The Center for Fiction in New York City has announced the winner of the 2011 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, formerly the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize.

The ten-thousand-dollar award went to Colorado author Bonnie Nadzam for Lamb (Other Press).

The story of a middle-aged man who develops a friendship with, in the words of the author, a "poor and rather dull eleven-year-old girl" and embarks on a road trip with her, Nadzam's novel has drawn comparisons to Nabokov's classic, and controversial, story of intergenerational relations. But, "while kneejerk comparisons to Lolita are inevitable," says Drew Toal of the Daily Beast, which counted Lamb among its "Great Weekend Reads" earlier this fall, "David Lamb is playing a different game than Humbert Humbert.”

Nadzam's novel won out over debuts by finalists David Bezmozgis for The Free World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Sarah Braunstein for The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (Norton), Carolyn Cooke for Daughters of the Revolution (Knopf), Ida Hattemer-Higgins for The History of History (Knopf), Shards by Ismet Prcic (Black Cat), and Touch by Alexi Zentner (Norton). Each of the authors shortlisted received an award of one thousand dollars.

At the award ceremony on Tuesday, the Center for Fiction also awarded Scribner editor in chief Nan Graham the Maxwell E. Perkins Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Field of Fiction.

Write a story structured around a series of vignettes based on the descriptions of imagined photographs. For an example, read Heidi Julavits's "Marry the One Who Gets There First: Outtakes From the Sheidegger-Krupnik Wedding Album," included in The Best American Short Stories, 1999 (Houghton Mifflin, 1999).

About six weeks after the announcement of the finalists for this year's T. S. Eliot Prize, a fifteen-thousand-pound award (approximately $23,500) given for a poetry collection, two poets have dropped off the shortlist. Australian writer John Kinsella followed British poet Alice Oswald, who won the award in 2002, in withdrawing from the running, both taking issue with the recently-established partnership of the Poetry Book Society, the prize administrator, with Aurum, an investment firm. Aurum signed on earlier this fall for a three-year sponsorship of the prize after the Poetry Book Society got word that it would lose funding from England's Arts Council effective in 2012.

"I am grateful to Alice Oswald for bringing the sponsorship of the T. S. Eliot Prize to my attention," said Kinsella, shortlisted for Armour, in a statement issued by Picador, his publisher. "I regret that I must do this at a particularly difficult time for the Poetry Book Society but the business of Aurum does not sit with my personal politics and ethics."

Oswald, shortlisted for her book Memorial (Faber and Faber), withdrew on Tuesday, citing Aurum's involvement in the management of hedge funds. "I think poetry should be questioning not endorsing such institutions," she said.

Following Oswald's announcement, Chris Holifield, director of the Poetry Book Society, said the poet would not be replaced on the shortlist with another contender. "It's too late to do that, which is unfortunate as there were other good people who would have liked to be on the shortlist," she told the Guardian. The Guardian reported that the Poetry Book Society declined to comment on Kinsella's withrawal.

Remaining on the shortlist are John Burnside's Black Cat Bone (Jonathan Cape), Carol Ann Duffy's The Bees (Picador), Leontia Flynn's Profit and Loss (Jonathan Cape), David Harsent's Night (Faber and Faber), Esther Morgan's Grace (Bloodaxe Books), Daljit Nagra's Tippoo Sultan's Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!! (Faber and Faber), Sean O'Brien's November (Picador), and Bernard O'Donoghue's Farmer's Cross (Faber and Faber). The winner will be announced on January 16.

Tonight in Santa Monica, California, United States Artists (USA) fetes fifty American artists, including three poets and a fiction writer, awarding them no-strings grants of fifty thousand dollars each. Among the winners are Terrance Hayes, who received the National Book Award in poetry last year for Lighthead (Penguin Books); poet Campbell McGrath, who won a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship in 1999; 2011 MacArthur fellow A. E. Stallings, a poet and translator; and fiction writer Karen Tei Yamashita, whose novel I Hotel (Coffee House Press) was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award.

The writers are recognized along with, among others, playwright Annie Baker; choreographer Liz Lerman; musician George Lewis; visual artist Lorraine O'Grady; and John Collins, the artistic director and founder of the Elevator Repair Service theater company, which has created literary productions such as Gatz, a marathon performance of The Great Gatsby, and the Hemingway-inspired The Select (The Sun Also Rises). Complete profiles of all fifty fellows are posted on the USA website.

The USA fellowships have been awarded since 2005 in an effort "to close the gap between the love of art and the ambivalence toward those who create it" (the grant program was created in response to the results of a study done by the Urban Institute showing that while 96 percent of Americans say they value art, only about a quarter believe that artists contribute to the good of society). Over the past six years USA has awarded fifteen million dollars directly to artists.

In the video below, 2011 fellow Campbell McGrath, who lives in Miami Beach, reads at the O, Miami poetry festival last spring.