G&A: The Contest Blog

Amazon announced yesterday the three finalists for its fifth annual Breakthrough Novel Award in fiction. Along with two genre titles, Portland, Oregon, writer Brian Reeves's novel, A Chant of Love and Lamentation, was selected by editors at Penguin for the shortlist.

Reeves's story blends Hawaiian history—the author lived on the islands for a number of years—with fictional events that see the state moving toward regaining sovereignty. "This novel comes from my sincere hope that the people of Hawaii may someday soon reclaim what was once theirs," says the author in his bio note.

Also shortlisted were Alan Averill's The Beautiful Land, a "literary-flavored time-travel tale," in the words of literary agent and contest reviewer Donald Maass, and Charles Kelly's historical mystery, Grace Humiston and the Vanishing.

Registered customers of Amazon are now invited to vote on the winner of the novel competition, who will receive a publishing contract from Penguin and a fifteen-thousand-dollar advance against royalties. Voters can read a snippet from each book on the Amazon website or, if they have access to the Kindle, download an extended excerpt for free. The winner will be announced on June 16.

Amazon announced yesterday the three finalists for its Breakthrough Novel Award in fiction. Along with two genre titles, Portland, Oregon, writer Brian Reeves's novel, A Chant of Love and Lamentation, was selected by editors at Penguin for the shortlist.

Reeves's story blends Hawaiian history—the author lived on the islands for a number of years—with fictional events that see the state moving toward regaining sovereignty. "This novel comes from my sincere hope that the people of Hawaii may someday soon reclaim what was once theirs," says the author in his bio note.

Registered customers of Amazon are now invited to vote on the winner of the novel competition, who will receive a publishing contract from Penguin and a fifteen-thousand-dollar advance against royalties. Voters can read a snippet from each book on the Amazon website or, if they have access to the Kindle, download an extended excerpt for free. The winner will be announced on June 16.

The Poetry Foundation announced yesterday the winner of its 2012 Emily Dickinson First Book Award, given occasionally for a poetry collection by a writer over forty.

Maryland writer Hailey Leithauser, born in 1954, received this year's honor for her collection, Swoop, which comes with a ten-thousand-dollar prize and publication of the book by award-winning indie Graywolf Press next year.

Leithauser, who returned to poetry in 2000 after taking decades off from writing post-college, has seen her poetry published in Antioch Review, Gettysburg Review, Poetry, and Sou'wester, as well as in The Best American Poetry 2010. In 2004 she won a "Discovery"/The Nation Award (now the "Discovery"/Boston Review Award). The poet, who studied English as an undergraduate and now holds a master's of library and information science, has worked most recently as senior reference librarian at the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C., though she's also taken turns as a salad chef, purveyor of gourmet foods, real estate office manager, copy editor, phone surveyor, and bookstore clerk.

“Leithauser is a risk-taker," says Graywolf editor Jeff Shotts. "She is innovative—with spirited titles and musical outbursts—but also nods to poetic tradition with rhyming sonnets and other lyric techniques...I am engaged, throughout, and admire her wide-ranging talent.”

The Poetry Foundation will honor Leithauser along with 2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winner W. S. Di Piero at a ceremony in Chicago on June 11.

The Associated Press reported earlier today that short story writer Charles Baxter has been awarded the 2012 Rea Award for the Short Story, an honor that includes a prize of thirty thousand dollars. Given annually to recognize a writer's body of work, the Rea Award has been given in the past to writers such as Andre Dubus, Grace Paley, Eudora Welty, and Tobias Wolff.

A statement by the prize judges praised Baxter's "original mind and ironic wit" and "acute feeling for the landscape of marriage, childhood, and art." Baxter's most recent story collection is Gryphon (Pantheon Books, 2011). He has also authored several novels and books on craft, including Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction (Graywolf Press, 2008).

In the video below, Baxter discusses what brought him back to the short story after he published five novels, and how "to get a sense of wonder into a short story" in the modern age.

The finalists for the thirteenth annual Caine Prize for African Literature, the ten-thousand-pound award (approximately sixteen thousand dollars) given for a short story written in English by an African writer, were announced last week. The shortlist of five was selected from 122 story entries by authors from fourteen African countries.

"This prize is more than just another award that will sprinkle fairy dust on a single, lucky writer every year—it is a force for change," says Bernardine Evaristo, this year's chair of judges, in a post on the Caine Prize blog. "I’m looking for stories about Africa that enlarge our concept of the continent beyond the familiar images that dominate the media: War-torn Africa, Starving Africa, Corrupt Africa - in short: The Tragic Continent. I’ve been banging on about this for years because while we are all aware of these negative realities, and some African writers have written great novels along these lines (as was necessary, crucial), isn’t it time now to move on? Or rather, for other kinds of African novels to be internationally celebrated."

Furthering the prize's goal to widen the global audience for new and innovative African fiction, the venues that originally published the shortlisted stories—two U.S. magazines, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and Prick of the Spindle, among them—have released digital editions of the works. Below is the list of this year's finalists, with first lines from each story, and links to the pieces in full (in PDF format).

Rotimi Babatunde of Nigeria for "Bombay’s Republic," published in Mirabilia Review, out of Lagos, Nigeria

"The old jailhouse on the hilltop had remained uninhabited for many decades, through the construction of the town’s first grammar school and the beginning of house-to-house harassment from the affliction called sanitary inspectors, through the laying of the railway tracks by navvies who likewise succeeded in laying pregnancies in the bellies of several lovestruck girls, but fortunes changed for the building with the return of Colour Sergeant Bombay, the veteran who went off with the recruitment officers to Hitler’s War as a man and came back a spotted leopard."

Billy Kahora of Kenya for "Urban Zoning," published in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, out of San Francisco

"Outside on Tom Mboya Street, Kandle realized that he was truly in the Zone."

S. O. Kenani of Malawi for "Love on Trial" from the his debut collection, For Honour and Other Stories (Random House Struik, Cape Town, South Africa)

"Mr Lapani Kachingwe’s popularity has soared."

Melissa Tandiwe Myambo of Zimbabwe for "La Salle de Départ," published in Prick of the Spindle, out of New Orleans

"Like so many omens, she had missed its significance at the time."

Constance Myburgh of South Africa for "Hunter Emmanuel" from Jungle Jim, out of Cape Town, South Africa

"Hunter Emmanuel shouldered his chainsaw and looked up at the trees."

If you're craving a little analysis with your reading, Aaron Bady, a PhD candidate in African literature at University of California, along with some choice friends, will be blogging about the Caine Prize stories for the next few weeks at the New Inquiry. (Thanks to the Millions for this tip.)

The announcement of the winner will take place at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England, on July 2. More details about this year's finalists and the past prize winners, who include Helon Habila, E. C. Osondu, and Binyavanga Wainaina, is avaialble on the Caine Prize website.

Last night we attended a unique book launch for New York City poet Elana Bell, featured in our May/June 2012 issue's "Winners on Winning" feature. Bell, who incorporated a dance performance and fund-raiser into the celebration of her debut collection, is the recipient of the 2011 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for Eyes, Stones, released in April by Louisiana State University Press.

When we interviewed Bell for our May/June article about the unexpected rewards of winning a book prize, she mentioned that she was using some of the prize money to realize an artistic vision. "Many of the poems in the collection are persona poems, in the voices of contemporary and historical characters who are inexorably linked to the land of Israel/Palestine," she said. "Sometime during the process of creating this book, I knew that I wanted to create a performance version based on the text. I wasn't sure what it would look like, but I knew it would be collaborative and somehow address the question: 'How can two narratives exist in one body?' When I found out I'd won the Whitman, I decided that rather than have a traditional book release party, I would create a performance piece with dancers and musicians addressing that question."

The piece premiered at a standing-room-only event that also included a silent art auction to benefit Just Vision, a nonprofit organization that promotes social justice in Israel and Palestine. A selection from the performance is featured in the video below.

[This article has been updated. An earlier version of this article failed to mention the sponsor for the Walt Whitman Award. The prize is given annually by the Academy of American Poets.]

The Believer's May issue has arrived, and with it, the announcement of the magazine's literary awards for books of poetry and fiction published in 2011. The honors are given annually for poetry collections deemed by the magazine's editors to be "the finest and most deserving of greater recognition" and novels and short story collections that are the "strongest and most underappreciated of the year."

Massachusetts poet Heather Christle takes the second annual Believer Poetry Award for The Trees The Trees (Octopus Books), her "casually incandescent second collection." (Her third book, What Is Amazing, was released by Wesleyan University Press this past February.)

Author of three poetry collections himself, New York City author Ben Lerner receives the seventh annual Believer Book Award in fiction for his "hilarious and sensitive" debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House Press). The book, which made it onto a number of best-of lists last year, was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Young Lions Fiction Award given by the New York Public Library.

Along with the winner announcements, the Believer also released a list of the books most nominated for shout-outs in its readers survey. Coming out on top in poetry are Tracy K. Smith's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Life on Mars (Graywolf Press), Dean Young's Fall Higher (Copper Canyon Press), and Carl Phillips's Double Shadow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which won this year's Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry. In fiction, readers' most frequent picks were The Art of Fielding (Little, Brown) by Chad Harbach, Pulitzer-nominated Swamplandia! (Knopf) by Karen Russell, and The Sisters Brothers (Ecco) by Patrick deWitt. The full account (summer reading list, anyone?) is posted on the Believer's website.

In the video below, Christle reads from her winning book at the Stain of Poetry reading series in New York City.

To accompany our May/June 2012 issue's feature "Winners on Winning," part of our special section on writing contests, we're posting a selection of mini-interviews with prize recipients on the benefits of their awards and what they learned from winning. The second author in our series is New York City poet and fiction writer Francine Witte.

Witte most recently won the Thomas A. Wilhelmus Chapbook Award (now dubbed the Editor's Fiction Chapbook Prize) from RopeWalk Press in 2010 for a collection of short short stories titled Cold June. Also the author of three other chapbooks of poetry and short fiction—Only, Not Only (Finishing Line Press, 2012), The Wind Twirls Everything (MuscleHead Press, 2009), and First Rain, which won Pecan Grove Press's 2008 National Chapbook Competition—she speaks with us about the hands-down best aspect of winning the Wilhelmus Award and what she'd suggest to writers looking to contests as a means to publication.

How did winning RopeWalk Press's Wilhelmus Chapbook Award change your career, if at all? Were you able to do anything special with the prize money, or did you make any important connections as a result of winning?
When I saw this contest listed in Poets & Writers, and I saw that Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler was the judge, my only thought was that this would be a chance to have his eyes on my work. That was all I was really hoping for at that point. I had always thought of him as a master of the short short form. When I was subsequently informed that I was one of the ten finalists, I had to take a deep breath. What if? Of course, I didn't want to become too hopeful. At that point, I did what I suppose many people do: I made a deal with God. I promised that if I were to win, I would give the prize money to my sister, who desperately needed it as her husband had recently suffered a stroke. The news of my winning came in an e-mail with the lead paragraph [containing] the magical words of Robert Olen Butler, who called my take on the short short "brilliant" and said I was a talented writer indeed. I couldn't even breathe. I immediately called my sister and told her the good news, that the money was on its way to her. But to me, the real prize was that beautiful paragraph that I later used as a blurb on the book cover. The exposure that came from the book was amazing. I now had people blogging about me. That was really a thrill. The reviews and comments I received were positive and when you are starting out—in publishing terms—it is very important that you know people are "getting" what you are trying to do. I also had an agent contact me—a first—though he wasn't really able to do much with a collection of short short stories.

Did the award have an effect on the path you've chosen to take in your work?
Just the validation and praise I received from having Cold June win the contest and get published has helped me on those dark days when I wonder what the hell I am even doing. All writers need that. I am a high school teacher, nearing retirement, so I am thinking that when I do have enough time to write that novel, I would probably structure it in short shorts. Winning the prize and hearing the comments from people I would not have normally have heard from has told me to keep true to the style in which I write.

What advice do you have for writers looking to contests as a way to get their work into the world?
Contests are an amazing way to get your work into the world. Winning a contest definitely raises your profile as a writer and certainly adds much to your cover letter. It's a concrete credit that people do respond to. When choosing which contests to enter, you'll want to choose carefully, though. Entering contests is expensive and time-consuming. You also want to make sure that what you're submitting really is your very best work. Choose a few good ones, contests you generally think you might have a good chance of winning, and avoid a scattershot method. Like any other submission, know the journal you are sending your work to. That will save you lots of time and money.

Kicking off the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this past weekend, a collection of standout books published last year were honored at the thirty-second annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. 

In poetry Carl Phillips won for his eleventh collection, Double Shadow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The book was a contender last year for the National Book Award, along with another Times Book Prize finalist, Bruce Smith for Devotions (University of Chicago Press). Also shortlisted for the Times honor were Jim Harrison for Songs of Unreason (Copper Canyon Press), Dawn Lundy Martin for Discipline (Nightboat Books), and Linda Norton for The Public Gardens (Pressed Wafer).

Alex Shakar won in fiction for Luminarium (Soho Press), his second novel after 2001's The Savage Girl (Harper). The finalists were Joseph O’Connor for Ghost Light (Frances Coady Books) and Michael Ondaatje for The Cat’s Table (Knopf), as well as National Book Award finalists Julie Otsuka for The Buddha in the Attic (Knopf) and Edith Pearlman for Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories (Lookout Books), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction went to Ismet Prcic for Shards (Black Cat). Prcic's novel won out over Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding (Little, Brown), Eleanor Henderson's Ten Thousand Saints (Ecco), Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House Press), and James Wallenstein's The Arriviste (Milkweed Editions).

The winner of the third annual prize in the graphic novel is Carla Speed McNeil for Finder: Voice (Dark Horse). Previous winners in the category include Adam Hines for Duncan the Wonder Dog (AdHouse, 2010) and David Mazzucchelli for Asterios Polyp (Pantheon, 2009).

The book prizes honor titles published in the previous year in twelve categories. For a list of all the winners, visit the award website.

To accompany our May/June 2012 issue's feature "Winners on Winning," part of our special section on writing contests, we'll be posting a selection of mini-interviews with prize recipients on the benefits of their awards and what they learned from winning.

First up, we speak with poet and creative nonfiction writer Danielle Cadena Deulen, whose essay collection, The Riots, was published in 2011 by University of Georgia Press as part of the AWP Award Series in Creative Nonfiction. The book went on to win another award, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, which offers winners a paid reading tour of several colleges. Her debut on the literary scene, the poetry collection Lovely Asunder, which she'd shopped for five years, was also released in 2011 as part of a prize—the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize from University of Arkansas Press. Deulen discusses how her two awards in different genres gave her an edge in the job market and offers strategies for polishing a contest manuscript.

How did winning your latest honor, the AWP Award Series in Creative Nonfiction, change your career?
I believe The Riots was pivotal in helping me to gain my position as an assistant professor in the doctoral creative writing program at the University of Cincinnati. Obviously, publications enable one to establish themselves in tenure track positions in academia—there’s nothing unusual about that. However, I applied and was hired as a poet. My first book, Lovely Asunder, was published in the same year just a few months earlier, and landed me an interview for the position. During the interview process, The Riots was published, and as it turns out, the faculty member that had taught creative nonfiction in the program at UC had recently left for a position elsewhere, so they needed someone who might be able to teach creative nonfiction as well.  This meant I had something extra to offer the department—important in such a tough job market! A more subtle benefit of winning the prize is that my work seems to have caught the attention of a few agents and editors at literary magazines I admire who’ve queried me for new essays.

Did the award have an effect on any decisions you made as a writer, on the path you chose to take in life or in your work?
Both prizes are recent, so it is still unforeseen how they might affect my future writing. However, in the responses I’ve received about The Riots, specifically, I have come to realize that there is a desire for innovative creative nonfiction. When I wrote The Riots I wasn’t thinking much about the audience for such a book and structured it in a way I found interesting—that is, I was working in forms that, at times, thwarted traditional ideas of prose, though were very familiar to me as a poet. As it turns out, other people found this interesting as well. As I move forward into new projects, in poetry as well as creative nonfiction, I will be thinking more actively about innovation: how structure might augment or illuminate my subjects.

What advice do you have for writers looking to contests as a way to get their work into the world?
This only applies to a manuscript that can be arranged in a variety of ways (poetry, essay, short fiction), but when submitting to contests, I believe it’s important to arrange your manuscript for a contest, not necessarily for the most artful arrangement. You have to keep two people in mind when arranging a manuscript for a contest: the contest judge and the contest screener. Be sure to research who the judge is for the contest you’re sending and read some of her work to determine if she might be aligned with what you’re attempting in your manuscript.  If you decide that the judge might be a good reader for your work, go on to worry about the screener.  The screener, who is likely a writer herself, will probably be reading your manuscript on a day that otherwise would have been a vacation from work and has a huge box of manuscripts beside her which she must get through relatively quickly in order to send something to the judge. This means your poor screener probably doesn’t have the time or energy to pour over your work; you must impress her immediately with something stylish and interesting.  For this reason, you should place your best piece first, offer her variety (in tone, form, or subject matter) throughout the manuscript to keep her reading, and be sure to end the manuscript with a strong piece as well. Then, cross your fingers, hold your breath, and keep in mind that dumb luck also plays a large part in this process. Be patient with yourself.

In the video below, Deulen discusses the variations in her approach to writing poems and prose.