G&A: The Contest Blog

New York City-based Poets House has extended the application deadline for its second annual Emerging Poets Fellowship Program to December 10. The four-month fellowship is open to emerging poets living in the five boroughs of New York City.

Funded by the Jerome Foundation, the program includes weekly writing workshops, mentoring sessions, meetings with guest speakers, and free access to the Poets House Library in lower Manhattan. From the Poets House website: “The program aims to deepen participants’ artistic practice by offering a robust professional network of poets and literary professionals, including special visits from editors and publishers, who will assist each writer with their artistic development and career.”

Emerging poets of any age may submit the required application form, a narrative biography, a personal statement, a curriculum vitae, and a work sample by mail to Poets House, Emerging Poets Residency, 10 River Terrace, New York, NY 10282. There is no application fee, and tuition is free for all poets accepted into the program. Recipients will be announced February 1.

The 2013 fellows will meet on Tuesday evenings from March 12 to June 4, 2013. Fellows will also meet one-on-one with workshop leaders and guest faculty, including poets Jen Bervin, CAConrad, Cornelius Eady, Ben Lerner, Evie Shockley, and Jean Valentine, throughout the residency.

Founded in 1985 by the late U.S. Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz and arts administrator Elizabeth Kray, Poets House offers a variety of programs and resources—including classes, readings, lectures, exhibitions, and a 50,000-volume poetry library—to emerging and established poets in New York City. For more information on the Emerging Poets Fellowship Program, and to find an application form and complete submission guidelines, visit the Poets House website. 

American author Kevin Powers's debut novel, The Yellow Birds (Little, Brown, 2012), a fictional account of one man's experiences during the Iraq war, has received the 2012 Guardian First Book Award. Powers will receive ten thousand British pounds.

Inspired by Powers’s own experiences as a machine gunner in Iraq, The Yellow Birds takes its name from a marching song that Powers learned while serving in the army. Lisa Allardice, judging panel chair and editor of the Guardian Review, reported that Powers “utterly fulfilled the first book award criteria of promise, originality and raw talent.” Allardice was joined on a panel of judges by authors Ahdaf Soueif, Kate Summerscale, William Dalrymple, and Jeanette Winterson, and Guardian deputy editor Katharine Viner.

Powers was chosen from a shortlist that included two other debut novels, Scottish author Kerry Hudson's Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-cream Float Before He Stole My Ma (Chatto & Windus, 2012) and American novelist Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding (Little, Brown, 2011), as well as two works of nonfiction—Lindsey Hilsum's account of the Libyan revolution, Sandstorm (Penguin Press, 2012) and Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House, 2012), which won the National Book Award in nonfiction in November.

Established in 1999 by the editors of the U.K.-based Guardian, the annual First Book Award is given for a debut work of poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction published in the previous year. Powers joins an international cast of winners that includes Siddhartha Mukherjee, who received the award last year for The Emperor of All Maladies (Fourth Estate, 2011), as well as Philip Gourevitch, Yiyun Li, Jonathan Safran Foer, Zadie Smith, and Chris Ware.

For more information about the Guardian First Book Award, visit the website. To listen to a discussion from the judges about this year's shortlist and an interview with Kevin Powers about his winning novel, check out this podcast from the Guardian. 

Last night at the National Book Foundation gala in New York City, novelist Louise Erdrich was named the recipient of the 2012 National Book Award in fiction. Erdrich, whose latest novel is The Round House (Harper, 2012), will receive $10,000.

This is the first National Book Award for Erdrich, 58, who over the past thirty years has authored fourteen novels and a short story collection, three books of nonfiction, and three poetry collections. The Round House, the second installment in a trilogy, follows an Ojibwe boy as he seeks to avenge his mother's rape. Erdrich, who is part Ojibwe, dedicated her award last night to "the grace and endurance of native people."

"This is a book about a huge case of injustice ongoing on reservations," she added. "Thank you for giving it a wider audience."

In nonfiction, Katherine Boo took the prize for her debut, Beyond the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House, 2012). David Ferry, whose latest collection is Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press, 2012), won the award in poetry. William Alexander won in the young people’s literature category for his young adult novel Goblin Secrets (Margaret K. McElderry, 2012). Each winner receives $10,000.

The awards were given amid recent discussions among publishers and the National Book Foundation that the annual award—one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the United States, second perhaps only to the Pulitzer—had become too insular, and was in need of expanding its image and scope. Finalists in fiction included such names as Dave Eggers and Junot Diaz; the finalists in nonfiction included Robert Caro's Lyndon Johnson series and the late Anthony Shadid's lauded memoir House of Stone (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). Honorary prizes were also given to author Elmore Leonard and longtime New York Times publisher and chairman Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr.

Established in 1950, the National Book Awards are given annually for works of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction published in the previous year. For more information, visit the National Book Foundation website.

Due to the recent effects of Hurricane Sandy, Ohio University Press has extended the deadline for the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize to November 15. The annual competition, which awards a $1,000 cash prize and publication by Ohio University Press, is given for a poetry collection.

Poets may submit previously unpublished manuscripts of sixty to ninety-five pages, along with a $25 entry fee, to Ohio University Press, 19 Circle Drive, The Ridges, Athens, Ohio 45701. The competition is open to poets who have published a full-length collection and those who have not. For more information and complete submission guidelines, visit the Ohio University Press website.

The annual prize is named for the poet Hollis Summers, who taught at Ohio University for many years and frequently wrote about the city of Athens in his poems. 

Poet Nick Norwood won last year’s prize for his third full-length collection, Gravel & Hawk, published this past April by Ohio University Press. In the podcast below from the PBS NewsHour program “Art Beat,” hear Nick read the poem “A.M.” from his winning collection.

Bard College has announced that author Brian Conn will be the recipient of the 2013 Bard Fiction Prize. Conn will receive a $30,000 cash award and a residency at Bard College during the spring 2013 semester. Conn received the prize for his debut book, The Fixed Stars, an experimental science fiction novel published by Fiction Collective 2 in 2010. As a writer-in-residence at Bard, located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, Conn will meet with students, give public readings, and continue to write.

“What won the respect of the Bard Fiction Prize judges was the remarkable way the weird, perplexing bleakness of the imagined society is firmly held in place by a narrative style at once bewildered and lucid—it has the air of a kind of deadpan tragedy, of the sort Kafka scared us with, and made us yearn for more," wrote the Bard Fiction Prize committee in a statement. “The Bard Fiction Prize has been anxious to celebrate innovation in the novel—and in Conn’s The Fixed Stars we found a perfect match of inventive fable with disquietingly radical storytelling. The prose sparkles with unique images, and the narrative itself is wonderful, at times wondrous even, and a highly original formal work, full of life.”

Conn’s fiction has appeared in both genre magazines and literary magazines, and The Fixed Stars was named one of Amazon’s ten best science fiction and fantasy books of 2010. In 2008, Conn cofounded the fiction journal Birkensnake at Brown University.

Established in 2001, the Bard Fiction Prize is given annually to an emerging writer under the age of forty for a work of innovative fiction. Last year Benjamin Hale received the prize for his novel The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (Twelve, 2011). The deadline for the 2014 prize is July 15, 2013. Visit the Bard website for guidelines. 

The Whiting Foundation recently announced the winners of its 2012 literary awards, which offer ten grants of $50,000 to emerging poets, fiction writers, creative nonfiction writers, and playwrights.

The 2012 Whiting Award recipients include nonfiction writer Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts of New York City, whose first book, Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America (Little, Brown, 2011), was among the 100 Notable Books of 2011 by the New York Times Book Review and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; poet Ciaran Berry of Hartford, Connecticut, whose first full-length collection, The Sphere of Birds, (Southern Illinois University Press, 2008) won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition in 2007; poet Atsuro Riley of San Francisco, whose first book, Romey’s Order (University of Chicago Press, 2010) won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Believer Poetry Award, and the Witter Bynner Award from the Library of Congress; fiction writer Alan Heathcock of Boise, Idaho, whose short story collection Volt (Graywolf Press, 2011) was a finalist for the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize; fiction writer Anthony Marra of Oakland, California, whose debut novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, and short story collection, The Tsar of Love and Techno, will be published in 2013 and 2014, respectively, by Hogarth Press; and fiction writer Hanna Pylväinen of New York City, whose debut novel, We Sinners, was published this past summer by Henry Holt.

Four playwrights, Danai Gurira, Samuel Hunter, Mona Mansour, and Meg Miroshnik also received the awards. 

The "no strings attached" grants are given to writers whose early work suggests a promising literary career to come. Past recipients of the Whiting Award have included Michael Cunningham, Mark Doty, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Tracy K. Smith, John Jeremiah Sullivan, David Foster Wallace, Colson Whitehead, and C. D. Wright.

The New York City-based Whiting Foundation has given the Whiting Awards annually since 1985. Candidates are nominated for the award by literary professionals, and an anonymous selection committee of accomplished writers, editors, and literary scholars appointed by the Whiting Foundation chooses the winners. There is no application process.