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Like snowflakes, every family is unique. From quirky aunts and greedy uncles to gracious moms and despicable cousins, every family is peculiar in some meaningful way. Write a poem about your family. Focus on the people who create the love, the pain, and the dynamics that define your family. Be honest. Be courageous. Be open.
The Stacy Doris Memorial Poetry Award, a new prize established by the San Francisco State University–based Fourteen Hills Press, will be given for a poem with a “truly inventive spirit.” The winner will receive five hundred dollars and publication in Fourteen Hills. The deadline is January 1.
Using the online submission system, poets may submit one poem of up to ten pages in length. The winning poem will be published in the Spring 2014 issue of Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review. Students currently enrolled at San Francisco State University are ineligible. All entries will be considered for publication. There is no entry fee.
The award was founded in honor of poet and translator Stacy Doris, who died in 2012 after a battle with cancer, and whose “inventive spirit is legendary,” the Fourteen Hills editors write. “Every book she wrote created a new poetic world with unexpected poetics.” The award will be given for a poem that posseses Doris’s “spirit of creative invention and inventive creation; engaging wit and ingenious playfulness; discovery in construction; and radical appropriations based on classical forms.” Chet Wiener will judge.
Established in 1994, Fourteen Hills Press publishes two volumes of its literary journal each year, as well as the annual winner of the Michael Rubin Book Award, a first-book prize given each year in alternating genres. General journal submissions of poetry, fiction, and art are open until January 1.
"Hello, you careful seamstress, you needle in my sternum." In this video clip, award-winning poet Jamaal May reads “I Do Have a Seam" from Hum, his first collection of poems, which was published by Alice James Books in November.
“Snow that covers us from above, cover us more deeply.” In this Motionpoems, James Longenbach narrates his nostalgic poem "Snow,” which is brought to life visually through welcoming images and soft watercolors. Created by video artist Deb Kirkeeide.
“This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.” In this video that originally aired in 2012, poet Joy Harjo reads “Perhaps the World Ends Here” for PBS NewsHour.
“Prose is what it is because of what it includes, but poetry is what it is because of what it leaves out.” Poet Marvin Bell discusses his writing process, influences on his work, and why he doesn't believe in writer's block.
The Fence Books Ottoline Prize—given for a poetry collection by a woman writing in English who has published at least one previous book of poetry—includes a $5,000 cash prize and publication by Fence Books. The deadline is November 30.
Using the online submission system, poets may submit a manuscript of up to eighty pages with a twenty-eight dollar entry fee. All entrants will receive a subscription to Fence Magazine.
Poet Brenda Hillman, whose most recent collection is Seasonal Works With Letters on Fire (Wesleyan Poetry Series, 2013) will judge. The winning collection will be published by Fence Books in the spring of 2015.
Established in 2001 as the Motherwell Prize (and later renamed the Alberta Prize), the recently rechristened Ottoline Prize has been awarded to poets such as Harmony Holiday, Chelsey Minnis, Ariana Reines, Sasha Steensen, and Laura Sims.
Fence Books is a branch of Fence Magazine, a literary journal and nonprofit organization founded in 1998 by editor Rebecca Wolf and affiliated with the University at Albany and the New York State Writers Institute. The press publishes books of poetry, fiction, critical texts, and anthologies, and sponsors three other book prizes for poetry and prose.
It is estimated that 43.4 million Americans will travel fifty or more miles this Thanksgiving weekend. Travel is so often inspiring because it mixes a sensory experience with the opportunity for a prolonged period of contemplation. Write a poem about a recent trip you took. Carefully select your words to evoke the sights and sounds that accompanied the journey of your inner thoughts and feelings.
“Do you know what it feels like to wait for your son to come home alive every night?" Award-winning poet Wanda Coleman, often called the “unofficial Poet Laureate of L.A.,” died Friday at the age of sixty-seven. Coleman’s book of poetry Mercurochrome was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001. In this clip from May 2013, she reads at California State University.
"I hear one of my poems and I'm mortified." Watch the trailer for Reaching for the Moon, a movie based on the life of renowned poet Elizabeth Bishop.
