G&A: The Contest Blog

The Vilcek Foundation, which recognizes the work of international artists and scientists living in the United States, is accepting submissions for its first twenty-five-thousand-dollar literature award.

The New York City–based foundation, established by a scientist and an art historian who both emigrated from the former Czechoslovakia, will also award four finalist prizes of five thousand dollars each.

The awards will be extended to writers who were born outside of the United States and are currently naturalized citizens or permanent residents pursuing a career in the country. There is an age limit for entrants— in order to be eligible, writers must not be older than thirty-eight as of December 31.

Entries, accepted only online and due on July 30, should include up to thirty pages of poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction. Details about what else to submit are available on the foundation's Web site. 

[Correction: The eligibility guidelines stated in the June 10, 2010, blog post omitted one group of U.S. residents that may apply for the prize. Both naturalized citizens and permanent residents (green card holders) are eligible for the award.] 

Kundiman, the Asian American poets organization, announced the winner of its first annual book prize this weekend.

Janine Oshiro, a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop now teaching in Hawaii, won the two-thousand-dollar award for her manuscript "Pier," which will be published by Alice James Books. Oshiro, who has participated in Kundiman's annual writing retreat, will also be featured in a reading in New York City, where the organization is based.

The finalists for the prize, which was open to published and unpublished Asian American poets living in the United States, are Serena Chopra, April Naoko Heck, Kirun Kapur, Caroline Kim-Brown, Michelle Young-Mee Rhee, Ira Sukrungruang, R. A. Villanueva, Shawn Wen, and Lynn Xu.

Information about next year's prize will be available this fall in our Grants & Awards database, and on the Kundiman Web site.

Two women poets whose works "open the lock of language" and act as "X-rays of our delusions and mistaken perceptions" were honored last night as winners of the Griffin Poetry Prize. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin of Ireland won the international prize for her collection The Sun-fish and Toronto poet Karen Solie took the Canadian prize for Pigeon (House of Anansi Press).

They each received sixty-five thousand dollars in addition to ten thousand dollars awarded for giving a reading the night prior to the ceremony, during which Adrienne Rich was celebrated with a Lifetime Recognition Award.

Their books were selected by judges Anne Carson, Kathleen Jamie, and Carl Phillips from a shortlist that included John Glenday (Grain), Louise Glück (A Village Life), Kate Hall (The Certainty Dream), the late P. K. Page (Coal and Roses), and Susan Wicks (translation of Valérie Rouzeau's Cold Spring in Winter). Each shortlisted writer received a prize of ten thousand dollars.

"Among the greatest of Solie’s talents, evident throughout the poems of Pigeon," the judges remarked in their citation for the poet, "is an ability to see at once into and through our daily struggle, often thwarted by our very selves, toward something like an honorable life."

"We are in a shifting realm, both real and otherworldly," the judges said of Chuilleanáin's book. "The effect of her impressionistic style is like watching a photograph as it develops."

In the video below, Chuilleanáin reads a poem from The Sun-fish, "The Witch in the Wardrobe," which the judges noted for its "startling imagery" of "a ‘fluent pantry’, where ‘the silk scarves came flying at her face like a car wash.'"

Shakespeare and Company, the famously bohemian Paris bookstore established ninety-one years ago, recently announced its founding of a novella competition open exclusively to unpublished writers.

Entries have not yet opened for the biennial award, which includes a prize of ten thousand euros (approximately twelve thousand dollars), but writers can stay tuned to this blog or the bookstore's Web site for the latest.

Guidelines will be posted on Shakespeare and Company's Web site on June 20, the final day of the annual literary festival based at the store, which has since 1951 made its home on Paris's Left Bank. What we already know about the rules: Manuscripts should be twenty-thousand to thirty-thousand words, there will be a fee to enter, and the deadline for the initial submission period will be December 1.

The contest announcement comes on the heels of the bookstore's launch of Paris Magazine, a new embodiment of the sporadically published journal created by the bookstore's owner, George Whitman. The nonagenarian American literary advocate performed his own act of reincarnation when he opened the current Shakespeare and Company ten years after Sylvia Beach's original store was shuttered during World War II. The first issue of the new magazine, edited by Fatema Ahmed, formerly of Granta, features works by international talent including stories by French-Senegalese author Marie NDiaye and emerging American fiction writer Jesse Ball, and a translation of Apollinaire by Whitman's friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

The North Carolina Humanities Council recently announced a call for submissions to its Linda Flowers Literary Award competition. A prize of five hundred dollars and a residency at the Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities will be awarded to a writer—state residency is not required—for a work of poetry or prose that relates to the people and cultures of North Carolina.

The award is given in honor of Linda Flowers, a member of the council who authored the nonfiction book Throwed Away: Failures of Progress in Eastern North Carolina (University of Tennessee Press, 1993), which draws on her personal experiences with economic travesties occurring in rural regions of her home state. "We want to celebrate excellence in the humanities achieved by people like her," the council says on its Web site, emphasizing that it will be seeking out writers "who not only identify with our state, but who explore the promises, the problems, the experiences, the meanings in lives that have been shaped by North Carolina and its many cultures."

The deadline for submissions is August 15. For more information about the award, writers can visit the Web site or e-mail the council.

Among other organizations offering state grants this summer is Literary Arts, based in Portland, Oregon, which supports the state's writers with fellowships of $2,500 (women writers whose work touches on themes of race, class, physical disability, or sexual orientation are also eligible for a special award). The deadline for submissions is June 25.

Maryland authors who have published or will publish a book in 2010 can submit titles for Towson University's Prize for Literature until June 15, and Washington State writers can enter their work for a grant from Seattle-based Artist Trust until June 25.

In the video below, North Carolina poet laureate Cathy Smith Bowers reads a poem from her most recent book, The Candle I Hold Up to See You (Iris Press, 2009), touching on the private, metaphorical language taught her by her mother.

In preparation for a season of tribute to late Beatles front man John Lennon, who was born seventy years ago and died thirty years ago this fall, the Beatles Story museum in Liverpool, England, is hosting a poetry competition. Along with a performance poetry contest, the museum is inviting entries for an international "paper poet" competition of works touching on the life of Lennon.

While there's no cash prize, poems by the winner and finalists will be considered for publication in an anthology. The honorees will also be invited (though expenses aren't covered) to an awards ceremony in Liverpool on November 6, held in conjunction with the poetry slam.

U.K. poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy will judge the competition. "From his earliest lyrics, John Lennon displayed a poet's sensitivity to language," Duffy said of the musician who named among his influences James Joyce, Lewis Carroll, and Oscar Wilde and authored a whimsical book of verse and prose, In His Own Write. "I'm delighted to judge this competition, which honors a famous son of a wonderful city...vibrant with language and poetry."

Poems of up to forty lines can be submitted via e-mail, with entries closing on September 10. There is no entry fee, but writers may submit only once. More information about the contest is available on the Beatles Story Web site.

In the video below, the Beatles perform "I Am the Walrus," with lyrics by Lennon, who was purportedly inspired by Carroll's poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter" and perhaps even Joyce's Finnegan's Wake when writing the song.

Fiction will mingle with film at the newly launched Oaxaca International Independent Film and Video Festival, which is offering writers a place in the competitive forum enjoyed by participating filmmakers. Writers can submit stories this summer, and the festival committee will select two winners—one writing in English, one in Spanish—to present their works at the festival, held from November 8 to 11 in the Mexican city of Oaxaca de Juárez (travel expenses are part of the award).

Each winner will receive a prize of fifteen hundred dollars, and the winning works also will be published in a commemorative book along with the stories of eight runners up—four in English, four in Spanish. An announcement of the honorees will be made on September 16.

The festival is limiting submissions to one thousand entries, and will accept stories via e-mail until July 31. An entry fee of ten dollars is required for stories submitted by June 10, and fifteen dollars thereafter. Complete guidelines and more information about the main event are available on the festival Web site.

On Friday, One Story journal founders Maribeth Batcha and Hannah Tinti playfully introduced into literary society nine writers whose first stories were published in the journal's pages. "Debutantes" Sam Allingham, Ramona Ausubel, Nell Casey, Amelia Kahaney, Cheston Knapp, Grant Munroe, Patrick Somerville, Cote Smith, and Arlaina Tibensky were escorted by some of literary fiction's biggest names before a crowd of readers, agents, editors, and fellow writers attending the journal's first Literary Debutante Ball. Jonathan Lethem, Michael Cunningham, Deb Olin Unferth, and Tinti herself were among the escorts, each of whom had played a mentoring role in the emerging writers' lives. 

Dan Chaon escorted Philadelphia writer Sam Allingham, whose fiction has appeared in One Story and An Other Magazine.

Michelle Latiolais and Ron Carlson escorted Ramona Ausubel, a graduate of the MFA program at the University of California in Irvine whose stories have appeared in journals including Slice, pax americana, and Green Mountains Review. The day before the event, she sold her story collection and her novel to Riverhead Books.

Tamara Jenkins escorted Nell Casey, the editor of Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression and An Uncertain Inheritance: Writers on Caring for Family, who is currently working on The Journals of Spalding Gray (forthcoming from Knopf in 2011).

Michael Cunningham escorted Amelia Kahaney, a writing teacher at Brooklyn College who also does some ghostwriting, and whose One Story story, "Fire Season," has been optioned for film.

Jim Shepard and Karen Shepard escorted Portland, Oregon, writer Cheston Knapp, who is also the managing editor of Tin House and director of the journal's Summer Writers Workshop.

Jonathan Lethem escorted Brooklyn story writer Grant Munroe, who has also written humor and essays for The Rumpus and McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

Hannah Tinti escorted Chicago author Patrick Somerville, author of the short story collection Trouble (Vintage, 2006) and the novel The Cradle (Little, Brown, 2009).

Deb Olin Unferth escorted Kansas writer Cote Smith, a recent graduate of University of Kansas's MFA program.

Victor LaValle escorted Arlaina Tibensky, the founder of the Pen Parentis literary salon in Manhattan whose young adult novel about a girl obsessed with Sylvia Plath is forthcoming in 2011 from Simon & Schuster's Pulse imprint.

In the video below, the debutantes make their way into the arena, a space in the Old American Can Factory in Brooklyn (home of the One Story offices), as comedian and writer John Hodgman makes introductions. 

Last night Melville House celebrated its first Moby Awards, given by the New York City indie press for video book trailers —the low-budget, the beautiful, and the cringe-worthy all represented—made in the past twelve months. Top trailers in five categories earned a golden whale and perhaps a nudge on YouTube—in the book world, sometimes even promotion could use a little promotion. Small press poetry got a nod from the judges, with the award for Best Low Budget or Indie Book Trailer going to the understated, animated short for Kathryn Regina's poetry chapbook, I Am in the Air Right Now, published in a limited edition—now sold out— by Greying Ghost Press.

The winners in the other predetermined categories, with a few honorable add-ons, are:
Best Big Budget or Big House Book Trailer: The stunning stop-motion video—books transform before your eyes—for Going West by Maurice Gee, released by Faber and Faber in 1992

Best Cameo in a Book Trailer: Zach Galifinakis (the Brooklyn actor and comedian of Hangover fame) in the video for John Wray's novel Lowboy, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2009

Best Performance by an Author: Dennis Cass in the trailer for his memoir Head Case (HarperCollins, 2007)

Least Likely Trailer to Sell the Book: Sounds of Murder (Cozy Cat Press, 2010) by Patricia Rockwell

Bloodiest Book Trailer: Killer by Dave Zeltserman (Serpent's Tail, 2010)

Best Foreign Film Book Trailer: Etcetera and Otherwise: A Lurid Odyssey, by Canadian author Sean Stanley, illustrated by Kristi-Ly Green (Tightrope Books, 2008)

Most Annoying Music: New Year's At the Pier: A Rosh Hashanah Story by April Halprin Wayland (Dial, 2009)

Biggest Waste of Conglomerate Money: Level 26, billed as "the world's first digi-novel," by CSI: Crime Scene Investigation writer Anthony Zuiker (Dutton, 2009)

While there were no rules for book publication dates, the videos had to have been produced between April 2009 and April 2010.

Below is the trailer for Regina's chapbook.

The late novelist J. G. Farrell was honored on Wednesday with the Lost Man Booker Prize, awarded for Troubles (Phoenix), which was published during a period in 1970 when changes in the prestigious prize's publication date guidelines rendered many books ineligible for entry.

The prize, given just this once to recognize a book released during that time, is the second Booker for a work by Farrell, who won the 1973 award for the second novel in a trilogy that began with Troubles, The Siege of Krishnapur (Weidenfeld & Nicolson

). Farrell died in 1979 in Ireland's Bantry Bay.

The winning book was selected by public vote by a majority— 38 percent—from a shortlist that included The Birds on The Trees (Virago Press) by Nina Bawden, The Bay of Noon (Virago Press) by Shirley Hazzard, Fire From Heaven (Arrow Books) by Mary Renault, The Driver's Seat (Penguin Classics) by Muriel Spark, The Vivisector (Vintage) by Nobel Prize–winner Patrick White. The semifinalists were determined by poet Tobias Hill, broadcaster Katie Derham, and journalist Rachel Cooke.

Troubles, which has not been out-of-print since its publication, was most recently published in a U.S. edition by New York Review Books Classics in 2002.