G&A: The Contest Blog

The inaugural Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, sponsored by the Georgia Review, is currently open for submissions. A prize of one thousand dollars and publication in the Georgia Review will be given annually for a poem. Poets may submit up to three previously unpublished poems written in English, totaling no more than ten pages, with a fifteen-dollar entry fee by May 15. The editors will judge. 

The winning poem will be announced on August 15, and will be published in the Spring 2014 issue of the Georgia Review. Current subscribers may enter the competition free of charge; nonsubscribers may choose to begin a subscription at the time of entry—thirty-five dollars for four issues, which is five dollars less than the regular price—in lieu of the entry fee. Submissions may be sent electronically or by mail to the Georgia Review, Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, 706A Main Library, 320 South Jackson Street, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602. 

Founded at the University of Georgia in 1947, the Georgia Review is a quarterly print journal of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, reviews, and visual art. “Never stuffy and never shallow,” the editors write on the magazine’s website, “the Georgia Review seeks a broad audience of intellectually open and curious readers.” Past contributors have included established writers as Rita Dove, Stephen Dunn, Louise Erdrich, Philip Levine, Barry Lopez, Joyce Carol Oates, Natasha Trethewey, David Wagoner, and Paul Zimmer, as well as many new and emerging voices. 

For more information about the Georgia Review and for complete contest guidelines, visit the website. 

The PEN/Faulkner Foundation has announced that George Saunders will receive the 2013 PEN/Malamud Award. Given annually for a “body of work that demonstrates excellence in the art of short fiction,” the award comes with a five-thousand-dollar purse.

Considered a master of the short story, George Saunders’s most recent collection, Tenth of December, was published in January by Random House. A professor of creative writing at Syracuse University, his previous works include the story collections and novellas CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1997), Pastoralia (2001), The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip (2005), The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005), and In Persuasion Nation (2007), and an essay collection, The Braindead Megaphone (2007). He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, GQ, and the New York Times Magazine. Saunders has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and four National Magazine Awards.

“Saunders is one of the most gifted and seriously comic short story writers working in America today,” said Alan Cheuse, a member of the Malamud Award selection committee, which is comprised of a panel of PEN/Faulkner directors. “And his comedy, like most great comedy, is dark….He's a Vonnegutian in his soul and, paradoxically, a writer like no one but himself.”

In addition to the prize money, PEN/Malamud Award winners are also invited to give a reading as part of the PEN/Faulkner Reading Series at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. This year’s reading will take place in December. 

Established in 1988, the PEN/Malamud Award honors the late writer Bernard Malamud. Past winners have included, among others, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Eudora Welty, Grace Paley, Stuart Dybek, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Munro, Junot Diaz, Lorrie Moore, Tobias Wolff, Amy Hempel, Nam Le, Edith Pearlman, and James Salter. 

Listen below as George Saunders discusses Tenth of December for the WNYC talk show Soundcheck.  

The judges for the 2013 National Book Awards were announced today. For the first time since the 1970s, the judges in each category will include not only writers, but also literary professionals such as editors, professors, and booksellers, in an attempt to broaden the reach of one of the country's most prestigious literary prizes. 

The judges in poetry include Nikky Finney, whose collection Head Off & Split won the 2011 National Book Award; Ada Limón, whose debut collection, Lucky Wreck, won the 2005 Autumn House Poetry Prize; D. A. Powell, who won the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for his collection Useless Landscape: A Guide for Boys; Jahan Ramazani, a professor at the University of Virginia whose book Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Craig Morgan Teicher, the poetry reviews editor for Publishes Weekly whose collection Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems won the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry. 

The judges in fiction include Charles Baxter, who was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2000 for The Feast of Love; Gish Jen, the author of four novels and a collection of stories, and an American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow; Charles McGrath, the former editor of the New York Times Book Review and former deputy editor at the New Yorker; Rick Simonson, who has been a bookseller at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, Washington, for over thirty-five years; and René Steinke, a 2005 National Book Award finalist for her novel Holy Skirts, and director of the MFA program at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

The judges in nonfiction include Jabari Asim, the author of The N Word and What Obama Means, a former book reviewer for the Washington Post, and an associate professor at Emerson College; André Bernard, vice president and secretary of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; M. G. Lord, author of The Accidental Feminist, Forever Barbie, and Astro Turf, for which she received an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant; Lauren Redniss, a finalist for National Book Award in 2011 for Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout; and Eric Sundquist, author and chair of the English Department at Johns Hopkins University.

“The expansion of the judging pool has given us an extraordinary diversity of voices on our panels,” said Harold Augenbraum, the executive director of the National Book Foundation, which sponsors the annual awards. “We expect spirited discussions throughout the process.” 

The judges for this year’s awards will be the first group in the history of the prizes to select a long list of ten titles in each of the four categories, to be announced on September 12. Twenty finalists from the long list will be announced on October 16, and the winners in each category will be announced at the sixty-fourth annual National Book Awards ceremony in New York City on November 20.  

Louise Erdrich took the 2012 award in fiction; David Ferry won in poetry, and Katherine Boo won in nonfiction.

The National Book Awards have been given annually since 1950 for books published in the current award year. Submissions for the 2013 prizes open today. Using the new online submission system, publishers may submit books published between December 1, 2012, and November 30, 2013, until June 3. Visit the website for complete submission guidelines. 

Open City, an online magazine published by the New York City–based Asian American Writers’ Workshop, sponsors five annual fellowships of five thousand dollars each to Asian American creative nonfiction writers in New York City. Fellows will write short-form and long-form pieces focused on the immigrant communities of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens, which will be published in Open City. Applications are due April 8.

In addition to the grant money, the Open City Creative Nonfiction Fellows program provides membership and full access, including workspace, to the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in Manhattan, as well as career guidance, editorial feedback, and meetings with publishing professionals. The program seeks emerging writers interested in journalism, Asian American communities, and social issues such as race, culture, immigration, and gentrification. Fellows are expected to write at least one piece each month, including features, profiles, Q&As, and personal essays, to be published in Open City. The yearlong fellowship begins on April 30.

Established in 1991, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop is a national nonprofit arts organization “devoted to the creating, publishing, developing, and disseminating of creative writing by Asian Americans” through various event series and the online magazines Open City and The Margins. Open City “takes the real-time pulse of metropolitan Asian America as it’s being lived on the streets of New York right now. We tell the stories of the Asian and immigrant neighborhoods that comprise one million New Yorkers and 13 percent of the city, but that rarely find their way to mainstream media.” For complete guidelines and application form, and to learn more about the Asian American Writers' Workshop, visit the website.

In the video below, current Open City Creative Nonfiction Fellows Rishi Nath, Sukjong Hong, and Humera Afridi discuss their experiences in the fellowship program. 

The Northern Colorado Writers (NCW) short fiction contest, which offers a grand prize of one thousand dollars and publication in the NCW anthology, is given annually for a short story. The deadline is March 31. 

Fiction writers may submit a story of up to five thousand words, along with a twenty-dollar entry fee, via e-mail. Writers need not be NCW members or Colorado residents to enter. 

Novelist and short story writer Alyson Hagy, whose most recent novel, Boleto, was published by Graywolf last year, will judge. A second-place prize of two hundred and fifty dollars and a third-place prize of one hundred dollars are also given. Winners, honorable mentions, and editor’s picks will be published in Pooled Ink, NCW’s annual anthology, which this year will be released in December. 

Established in 2006 by freelance writer Kerrie Flanagan, the Fort Collins–based Northern Colorado Writers was founded in order to “encourage and support writers of all levels and genres.” The organization hosts an annual writers conference—including workshops in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, as well as round-tables with editors and agents—which will be held on April 26 and 27 at the Fort Collins Hilton. NCW also sponsors a creative nonfiction contest (which accepts submissions from April 1 through June 30) and a poetry contest (which accepts submissions from July 1 through September 30). 

Visit the NCW website for complete contest guidelines. 

Last week, during a ceremony at the British Library in London, the Folio Society announced the launch of a new literature prize worth forty thousand pounds, or roughly sixty thousand dollars. 

The Folio Prize will be given annually for books of literary fiction, regardless of form or genre, written in English by an author from any country and published in the United Kingdom during the previous calendar year. The inaugural prize will be awarded in 2014. 

Led by prize cofounder Andrew Kidd, a literary agent and former publisher of Picador/Macmillan, the advisory committee gathered over a hundred authors, editors, and critics from around the world to form the Folio Academy, from which a panel of five judges will be selected each year. The Folio Society—a London–based publisher that reissues classic works of literature in illustrated special editions—was announced as the prize’s sponsor earlier this year. 

Academy members include Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee; Booker Prize recipients Margaret Atwood, Peter Carey, Ian McEwan, Michael Ondaatje, and Salman Rushdie; critics Geoff Dyer and Elif Batuman; Granta editor John Freeman, n+1 editor Keith Gessen, and New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman; American authors Michael Chabon, Michael Cunningham, Bret Easton Ellis, Junot Díaz, Ben Lerner, Richard Powers, Alice Sebold, and Maria Semple; and international writers Nam Le, China Mieville, David Mitchell, Philip Pullman, Zadie Smith, Miguel Syjuco, Colm Toibin, and Jeanette Winterson.

The panel of judges will consider eighty books each year for the prize. The Academy will nominate sixty titles (each member is encouraged to nominate up to three titles per year); publishers will also be invited to nominate titles, from which twenty additional finalists will be chosen. The panel will select a shortlist of eight books, and the final winner will be announced in the spring. The judges for the first Folio Prize will be announced this summer, and the inaugural winner will be announced in March 2014. 

To watch a video from the launch and for more information, visit the Folio Prize website. 

The Poetry Foundation has announced that poet and translator Marie Ponsot will receive the 2013 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes given to American poets. Given for lifetime achievement, the award carries with it a $100,000 purse. 

Born in New York City, where she still resides, Ponsot, ninety-one, joins poets John Ashbery, Lucille Clifton, Yusef Komunyakaa, Philip Levine, and Adrienne Rich on the roster of Ruth Lilly winners. W. S. di Piero took the 2012 prize. Ponsot’s work—which often tackles and challenges traditional forms such as the vilanelle and sestina—includes the collections Springing, The Green Dark, True Minds, The Bird Catcher (which won the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award), and, most recently, Easy (Knopf, 2009). She has also translated more than thirty books into English from the French.

Given annually since 1986, the Ruth Lilly Prize is one of the largest monetary prizes given for poetry in the world. As part of the award, Poetry magazine will publish eleven of Ponsot’s poems in its May issue. Christian Wiman, the magazine’s editor, described Ponsot’s poems as “marvels of intellectual curiosity and acuity” that “will also break your heart.” She will participate in a celebratory reading on April 8 at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.

Last fall, the Poetry Foundation also named the recipients of the 2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships, the $15,000 awards given annually to five emerging U.S. poets between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one. 

It’s been a good week—and a good year—for Claire Vaye Watkins, whose debut short story collection, Battleborn, was published by Riverhead Books last fall. On Thursday morning it was announced that Watkins would receive an American Academy of Arts & Letters Prize of $10,000; the night before, she beat out Junot Díaz and Don Chaon for the 2012 Story Prize, the coveted annual award of $20,000 given for an outstanding collection of short fiction. 

At a reading and awards ceremony at the New School in New York City on Wednesday night, Watkins’s debut was selected for the Story Prize—given since 2004 for a collection published in the previous year—over Díaz’s This Is How You Lose Her (Riverhead), and Chaon’s Stay Awake (Ballantine). The award is the largest monetary book prize given for fiction in the United States. Chaon and Diaz each received $5,000. 

Story Prize founder Julie Lindsey and prize director Larry Dark selected the three finalists from among ninety-eight books submitted for consideration. Final judges Jane Ciabattari, Yiyun Li, and Sarah McNally selected Watkins as the winner. The 2011 award went to Steven Millhauser for his collection We Others (Knopf).

Watkins will also receive the American Academy of Arts & Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, a prize of $10,000 given to an emerging writer for a work published in the previous year. Watkins joins a host of established writers to win 2013 Arts & Letters Awards, including Lydia Davis, Jennifer Egan, D.A. Powell, and Kevin Powers. 

Adding to Watkins’s ever-growing list of literary accolades, she was also selected this week as a 2013 One Story Literary Debutante. Earlier this year, she was chosen as one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35, and Battleborn was named a Best Book of 2012 by the San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Time Out New York and Flavorwire. The debut also received a Best Short Story Collection nod by NPR, and won the 2012 Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.

Watkins’s stories and essays have appeared in Granta, One Story, the Paris Review, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Best of the West 2011, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences. An assistant professor at Bucknell University, Watkins is also the co-director, with Derek Palacio, of the Mojave School, a nonprofit creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada.

Yale University Press has announced the winner of the 2013 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. Given annually since 1919 to a poet under the age of forty, the prize is the oldest literary award in the United States. 

Eryn Green of Denver received the 2013 prize for his collection, Eruv, which will be published by Yale University Press in April 2014. Judge Carl Phillips says that the winning work “reminds us how essential wilderness is to poetry—a wilderness in terms of how form and language both reinvent and get reinvented; meanwhile, the sensibility behind these poems points to another wilderness, the one that equals thinking about and feeling the world—its hurts, its joys—deeply and unabashedly, as we pass through it.”

Eryn Green is a doctoral candidate at the University of Denver and received an MFA from the University of Utah. His work has appeared in Jubilat, Colorado Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and elsewhere. In addition to the publication of his book, he will also receive one of five writing fellowships offered at The James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut.

Green’s book will be the 108th volume in the Younger Poet series. Will Schutt’s Westerly, also chosen by Phillips, received the 2012 prize, and will be published in April. Past winners have included John Ashbery, Jack Gilbert, Robert Hass, Adrienne Rich, and Jean Valentine. 

Submissions for the 2014 prize will open this fall. Visit the website for more information and complete guidelines.