“To stand in this library again is a profound experience, a return to a wellspring of story and encouragement, here where many of the librarians knew me by name when I was a shy kid who’d walk home with a stack of seven books, one to devour each day before exchanging them for the next stack,” writes Rebecca Solnit in an essay about returning to her childhood public library, adapted for Literary Hub from a talk at Novato Public Library in California. Write an essay that reflects on your own experiences visiting libraries, whether long ago or more recently. Taking inspiration from Solnit’s essay, feel free to wander from metaphysical associations to books and reading, to personal memories tied to physical spaces, to the geographical and cultural history of the library’s locale.
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.