G&A: The Contest Blog

In celebration of its sixtieth year honoring authors with the National Book Award, the National Book Foundation (NBF) has created a blog that, over the course of the next few months, will revisit all of the winning books of fiction from 1950 to 2008. The book-a-day blog commenced yesterday, with National Book Award finalist Rachel Kushner and NBF executive director Harold Augenbraum offering their words about Nelson Algren’s The Man With the Golden Arm (Doubleday). For the cross-reference-lover, each blog post also suggests links to more information on the book and author, as well as facts about each title, and names of judges and finalists, giving readers an idea of how the awards landscape looked in a given year.

Why focus only on winning fiction? The NBF, which currently grants the award in poetry, nonfiction, and young people’s literature, as well, says on its Web site that the prize in fiction has been the only category that has seen a winner every year since the National Book Awards were instituted. Also, many of the fiction winners have gone on to literary fame, and out of the seventy-seven winning titles, seventy-four are still in print—a higher percentage than in any other genre.

New posts by authors, editors, and other members of the literati will go up daily until September 21—with Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country (Modern Library) closing the series—when the NBF will invite readers to vote for the "Best of the National Book Awards Fiction." (Reminiscent of the Man Booker Prize's celebratory "Best of Booker" competition in 2008.) Voters will have the opportunity to win two tickets to the 2009 National Book Awards ceremony. The organization has also sent ballots to six hundred writers, asking them to select three of their favorite titles.

More about the sixtieth anniversary campaign can be found on the NBF Web site, or via the organization’s Twitter feed.

One month remains before the close of the first poetry book contest from Mississippi Review, the literary magazine of the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. The new series, whose deadline is August 1, will award three poets one thousand dollars each and publication of their collections in January 2010. The winners will also each receive one hundred copies of their books and distribution to fellow entrants and the magazine’s subscribers.

The inaugural judge is Dara Wier, author of eleven poetry collections including Remnants of Hannah (2006), Reverse Rapture (2005), Hat on a Pond (2002), and, forthcoming this fall, Selected Poems, all published by Wave Books. Weir was born in New Orleans and attended Louisiana State University. She received her MFA from Bowling Green State University in 1974 and her first collection, Blood, Hook & Eye, was published by the University of Texas Press three years later.

In Wier’s profile on the Academy of American Poets Web site, John Ashbery is quoted as saying of her work, "It may not be for the faint of heart—most intense experiences aren’t—but those who stay with it will find themselves face to face with a world whose eerily sharp focus suggests recent satellite photographs of Mars. And they will never be the same again."

Poets may submit any number of manuscripts (48 to 56 pages each) to the contest, with each entry accompanied by a twenty-five-dollar fee. The winners will be announced in September.

Last week, National Public Radio commenced a monthlong microfiction contest, seeking out prose that, in the words of judge James Wood, "strikes at the very heart of the short story as a project, which is to get something going rapidly." Writers are asked to submit original fictional stories that can be read in less than three minutes, with a length limit of six hundred words.

While no monetary prize is offered, Wood, a literary critic for the New Yorker and author of numerous essays on fiction, will read his favorite works on air throughout the summer, and one writer will be interviewed on a weekend edition of All Things Considered. The winning selections will also be posted on the NPR Web site.

Pointing to authors such as Anton Chekov and Lydia Davis as masters of the form, Wood offers some words of advice to writers of tiny tales: "One of the most effective ways to get a very short story vivid is to think in terms of voice," he says on the NPR Web site. "I'm going to be looking at a writer's ability to suggest a world, rather than to fill it in and dot every i."

Works can be submitted via the NPR Web site until July 18. As of Sunday, the contest had received thirteen hundred entries.

Not too long ago the Great Lake Colleges Association announced the winners of its New Writers Awards, given annually to a poet, fiction writer, and creative nonficiton writer to honor their first books. The University of Iowa Press published two of the winning titles: Don Waters's story collection Desert Gothic and Melissa J. Delbridge's memoir Family Bible. Indie publisher Curbstone Press released Teeth, the debut of winning poet Aracelis Girmay. (Incidentally, both Girmay and Delbridge have been featured in Poets & Writers Magazine.) As part of the award, each of the winners are invited to give readings, meet with students, and lead classes at several of the GLCA's member colleges, each of which pay five hundred dollars.

So, where might these three recent winners travel to collect their honoraria and meet potential readers? The following are the association's member colleges in Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvanie, and Ohio: 

Albion College
Allegheny College
Antioch College
Denison University
DePauw University
Earlham College
Hope College
Kalamazoo College
Kenyon College
Oberlin College
Ohio Wesleyan University
Wabash College
The College of Wooster

The deadline for this year's Pearl Poetry Prize is July 15. The annual award, which offers a thousand dollars and publication by Pearl Editions, an independent press in Long Beach, California, is given for a full-length poetry collection. Below are the winners of the last ten contests. Who will judge Debra Marquart, herself a previous winner, pick this year?

2008: Alison Luterman's See How We Almost Fly, chosen by Gerald Locklin
2007: Lavonne J. Adams's Through the Glorieta Pass, chosen by David Hernandez
2006: Kevin Griffith's Denmark, Kangaroo, Orange, chosen by Denise Duhamel
2005: Ada Limón's This Big Fake World, chosen by Frank X. Gaspar
2004: Elizabeth Oakes's The Farmgirl Poems, chosen by Donna Hilbert
2003: Andrew Kaufman's Earth's Ends, chosen by Fred Voss
2002: Richard M. Berlin's How JFK Killed My Father, chosen by Lisa Glatt
2001: Micki Myer's Trigger Finger, chosen by Jim Daniels
2000: Debra Marquart's From the Sweetness, chosen by Dorianne Laux
1999: Robert Perchan's Fluid in Darkness, chosen by Ed Ochester

Julia Alvarez was recently named winner of the fourteenth annual F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Award. The prize, sponsored by the F. Scott Fitzgerald Conference, an annual day-long event held at Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland, honors the achievements of a "great American author." Alvarez, whose most recent book is the novel Return to Sender (Knopf, 2009), writes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and books for young readers. She will recieve the award at this year's conference on October 17.

Previous recipients of the award are William Styron, John Barth, Joyce Carol Oates, E. L. Doctorow, Norman Mailer, Ernest J. Gaines, John Updike, Edward Albee, Grace Paley, Pat Conroy, Jane Smiley, William Kennedy, and Elmore Leonard.

The conference was started in 1996 when the city of Rockville celebrated the centennial of the birth of Fitzgerald, who happens to be buried in the town at Saint Mary's Church. This year's event will feature panel discussions, workshops, and "publication conversations."

Times Square may have been reduced to a pedestrian mall—or elevated to a walker's oasis, depending on your perspective—but it's a safe bet that it will always retain a certain poetic quality. The fine folks at the Poetry Society of America know this, and they've launched the second annual Bright Lights Big Verse contest to prove it.

Four winners will each receive a prize of $750 and a trip to New York City to read their winning poems at an event in Times Square. Until July 15, poets may submit poems of any length that celebrate Times Square and the qualities it represents: diversity, desire, dynamism, and the marriage of commerce and culture, according to the PSA and its cosponsor, the Times Square Alliance. Robert Casper, Brett Fletcher Lauer, and Alice Quinn will judge.

Check out the PSA Web site for complete guidelines and instructions for online submissions. And remember, any poem submitted must be suitable for public display, which, since we're talking about Times Square, home to the Naked Cowboy, is open to interpretation.

The shortlist for the 2009 Caine Prize for African Writing was announced last month, and for the six finalists, the waiting is almost over. The winner of the annual prize, which is worth ten thousand pounds (approximately sixteen thousand dollars), will be announced at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England, on July 6.

The following shortlist was selected from 122 entries from 12 African countries: 

Mamle Kabu (Ghana) for "The End of Skill" from Dreams, Miracles and Jazz (Picador Africa)
Parselelo Kantai (Kenya) for "You Wreck Her" from the St. Petersburg Review
Alistair Morgan (South Africa) for "Icebergs" from the Paris Review
EC Osondu (Nigeria) for "Waiting" from Guernica Magazine
Mukoma wa Ngugi (Kenya) for "How Kamau wa Mwangi Escaped Into Exile"  from Wasafiri

The prize is given for a short story written by an African writer and published in English. Last year's winner was South African writer Henrietta Rose-Innes for her short story "Poison" from Africa Pens (Spearhead). 

Late last year we told you about Cave Canem's announcement of the inaugural Cave Canem Northwestern Press Poetry Prize, a second book award for African American poets. Six months later, the nonprofit has announced the first winner of the prize: Indigo Moor for his book Through the Stonecutter's Window. John Keene, who, along with Reginald Gibbons and Parneshia Jones, judged the prize, wrote that Moor's poems "open a sustained and impressive dialogue with the visual arts, history, the natural world, and the poet's dreams and nightmares, while dancing poly-rhythmically across and down each page."

Moor's first poetry collection, Tap-Root, was published in 2006 by Main Street Rag as part of its Editor's Select Poetry Series. Northwestern University Press will publish Through the Stonecutter's Window in March 2010. 

In addition, two poets received honorable mention: Remica Bingham for "What We Ask of Flesh" and JoAnne McFarland for "Acid Rain." 

In case you missed it, last month Independent Publisher announced the winners of the 2009 “IPPY” Awards, honoring the year’s best independently published books. There were more than four thousand entries in eighty-five national and regional categories. Here are a few of the recent winners:

Poetry: The Baseball Field at Night (Lost Horse Press) by Patricia Goedicke and or words to that effect (openDmusic) by Dave Tutin

Literary Fiction: Adam the King (Other Press) by Jeffrey Lewis

Short Story Fiction: The Cult of Quick Repair (Coteau Books) by Dede Crane

Essay/Creative Nonfiction: An Enemy of the People: The Unending Battle Against Conventional Wisdom (Doukathsan Press) by Lawrence R. Velvel

The annual awards are intended to bring increased recognition to books published in the past year by independent and university presses as well as self-published titles. The awards program was launched in 1996 and is open to all members of the independent publishing industry.