“We begin with history. The slave codes of South Carolina, 1739,” begins Nikky Finney’s 2011 National Book Award acceptance speech for Head Off & Split (Northwestern University Press, 2011), where she traces the history of literacy in her own life and in the lives of African Americans. Finney is the recipient of the 2020 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, conferred annually to honor outstanding artistic achievement over a poet’s career.
Find details about every creative writing competition—including poetry contests, short story competitions, essay contests, awards for novels, grants for translators, and more—that we’ve published in the Grants & Awards section of Poets & Writers Magazine during the past year. We carefully review the practices and policies of each contest before including it in the Writing Contests database, the most trusted resource for legitimate writing contests available anywhere.