Megan
Harlan and Mariko Nagai, both of
them writers of poetry and fiction, have won 2009 book publication
prizes from the University of Missouri's BkMk
Press. Harlan, who lives in Berkeley, California, won the John Ciardi
Prize for Poetry for her debut collection, Mapmaking, selected by
Sidney Wade. Jonis Agee chose
Nagai’s first story collection, Georgic,
as winner of the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction. Each winner received one thousand dollars, and their books will be published
by BkMk Press next year.
Harlan’s poems and stories have appeared in AGNI Online, Meridian,
Prairie Schooner,
and Sycamore Review, among other journals. She has also written essays about her travels to global destinations such as the Orkney Islands of Scotland and the oases of Tunisia for the New York Times.
Nagai, who lives in Tokyo and teaches at Temple University’s Japan
campus, has previously published a poetry collection, Histories of Bodies,
which won the 2005 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award and was released by
Red Hen Press in 2007. She has also received Pushcart Prizes in both
poetry and fiction, and translates Japanese literature.
The deadline for the 2010 book prizes is January 15. The contests are open to poetry manuscripts of 50
to 110 pages and short fiction manuscripts of 125 to 300 pages, and
writers should submit an entry fee of twenty-five dollars along with
each submission.