With a new batch of deadlines listings just posted in our Grants & Awards database, over the next few days we'll be highlighting select prizes with details about what winners can expect, judge profiles, winner stats, and more.
Kore Press, a feminist outfit in Tucson, Arizona, is now accepting story submissions for its Short Fiction Award competition (judge TBA), which offers a one-thousand-dollar prize and publication of the winning work as a chapbook. We asked the folks at Kore how the chapbooks are promoted and distributed and how authors are publicized. Here's what they had to say:
"Our chapbooks are usually published in editions of about four hundred, and are distributed and sold in independent bookstores and libraries throughout the United States, as well as on our Web site and Amazon.
"These chapbooks are collected by many special collections and archives throughout the country, along with the rest of the Kore Press collection of published works, appreciated for its cultural, aesthetic,and social value as Kore Press is one of six feminist presses in the United States.
"Kore Press and the author work collaboratively pre- and post-publication to plan effective marketing and publicity for the book and sales goals. Kore Press works up press releases, tip sheets, press kits, and more to represent the book, and likes to pitch its chapbooks to various book awards and always hopes to support our authors in as many readings and events as possible."
In other Kore Press contest news, the deadline for the First Book Award in poetry has been extended to August 31. The judge for this year's contest is Bahnu Kapil, who teaches at Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado. Her works, which "for some readers, function as prose, and for others as poetry" (according to her bio on the Web site of literary magazine Almostisland), include Incubation: A Space for Monsters (Leon Works), and The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers and Humanimal: A Project for Future Children, both published by Kelsey Street Press, a Berkeley, California, press for women writers.
In addition to their contests, Kore Press also accept submissions of full-length book manuscripts during the month of January to consider for its annual catalog of six to nine titles. Since the open submissions period is not a contest, the editors' review process is not anonymous.