Triple Header contest: poetry, short story, essay

New Letters, the journal for University of Missouri-Kansas City is running three contests that offer top prizes of $1500 each, for a group of poems, an essay or a short story.

The publication has been operating since the 1930s (originally called the University Review) and the contest, begun in 1986, is one of the longest running in the US. They get about 500 entries in each of the categories, with those being culled to about 20 to each final judge (3 contests, 3 final judges).

For the poetry competition, you can submit a group of 3 to 6 poems and they can be unrelated. Short story and essay entries are limited to 8,000 words. Otherwise guidelines are the same for each contest.

There are no topic limitations, just make sure you have a clear voice. Entry deadline is May 18; the fee is $15 for your first entry and $10 for subsequent entries; multiple entries (obviously) are allowed as are simultaneous submissions. Each entry must be sent separately. The works have to be unpublished and your own creations. You can enter either by snail mail, or through an on-line process. Hard copy submissions will not be returned.

One caveat regarding the entry fee, a one-year/renewal subscription to New Letters, which is part of the fee, is only for US residents because of mailing costs. (The journal comes out quarterly.) Canadian residents and others still pay the full fee. Winners will be published in the fall issue of the journal.

In addition to the money, top winners will get published in New Letters. Some honourable mentions may get published as well, based on the judges’ decisions.

You can submit electronically at ecommerce.umkc.edu/newletters/order3.cfm, or mail your hard copy entry to: New Letters Literary Awards, University House, 5101 Rockhill Road, University of Missouri-Kansas City, Kansas City, MO 64110

For more details about hard copy entries, runners-up and the judges go to: www.newletters.org/awards.asp

Malahat Review’s short story contest opens

The Malahat Review, a long-standing Canadian literary magazine produced by the University of Victoria, has opened its annual short story contest.

Deadline for the Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction is May 1.  The winner will receive $1,000 and publication in the Fall issue of Malahat Review. That person will also be interviewed and the interview will appear in Malahat Lite, the magazine’s e-newsletter.

Every contestant receives a one-year subscription to The Malahat Review either for themselves or a friend. (You set that up in your entry form.)

Maximum length is 3,500 words and you can enter through an on-line process or use regular mail. Eligibility is limited to writers who have not yet published in book form. You can send more than one short story but each must be sent separately and be accompanied by a separate entry fee. Standard formatting applies whether you send by email (.doc or docx files, or PDF) or by regular mail.

Entries already published, accepted, or submitted elsewhere (no simultaneous submissions) are ineligible. Check out the details using the URL at the end of this blog; Malahat is very specific on what “published elsewhere” means.

The cost for you to enter depends on your location: for Canadian entries it’s $25 CAD; for American entries, $30 US; or for entries from Mexico and outside North America it’s $35 US. (Your fee pays for the subscription.)

Entry and payment are on-line, although you can only pay by using a credit card. if you opt to enter and pay using snail mail, the price is the same.

The stories will be blind judged and the final judge is Alissa York. Alissa studied English literature at McGill University and the University of Victoria. She is a faculty member at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies and regularly teaches at the Banff Centre for the Arts. She lives in Toronto. Her novel, Fauna, was short listed for the Giller prize and her short stories have won the Journey Prize and the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award.

To get more information on this contest or to enter go to: http://www.malahatreview.ca/contests/far_horizons_fiction/info.html.  if you submit on-line, entering is a multi-step process; you need to pay your fee first.

Short story contests (1)

As promised, here are three contests I think are interesting; two from Glimmer Train and one from Writer’s Digest. Although I said I’d post contests weekly I do plan to add a couple more in my Sunday post, just to get caught up. Normally, I expect the contest postings to give readers at least 6-8 weeks advance warning of deadlines.

Glimmer Train

You have until Sept. 30 (nine days from now) to enter your stories into Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open contest. The U.S. magazine is produced by two sisters in Oregon who have created a very credible, high quality literary publication that pays decent money both to their monthly contest winners and to their writers whose standard submissions are accepted. When they created Glimmer Train in 1990, they thought they might eventually break even. So far that’s still a dream.

Here’s the deal for the Fiction Open competition:

• It’s open to all themes and all writers, stories must be original and unpublished (they accept simultaneous submissions);
• story length is 2,000 to 20,000 words (care to write a novelette?);
• Deadline is Sept. 30
• entry fee (they call it a reading fee) $19 US.
• 1st prize is $2500 and publication in Glimmer Train, 2nd is $1000, third is $600.
• You enter on-line through their contest pages.Here’s the page for the guidelines: https://www.glimmertrainpress.com/writer/html/index2.asp?action=login.

You can set up your (free) submission account from there. You enter online and pay online. They take credit cards, but not PayPal or similar established, on-line payment systems.

The second Glimmer Train contest is Family Matters. The basic rules for this one are:

• It’s open to all writers, stories must about family matters, be original and unpublished (they accept simultaneous submissions);
• story length is up to 12,000 words
• Deadline is Oct. 31
• entry fee (reading fee) $15US.
• 1st prize is $1500 and publication in Glimmer Train, 2nd is $500, third is $300.
• You enter on-line through their contest pages.

Here again is the guidelines page https://www.glimmertrainpress.com/writer/html/index2.asp?action=login.

Sci Fi contest deadline extended

Writer’s Digest Sci Fi competition had a deadline of Sept. 15, now extended to Oct. 31. Also, it’s actually a contest for both science fiction and fantasy stories.

Here’s the deal for entering this contest:

• Top prize winner gets: A $500 cash prize; $100 off a purchase at http://www.writersdigestshop.com/; A copy of the 2013 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market; and your work will be promoted in Writer’s Digest‘s May/June issue and on their website: writersdigest.com (honourable mentions get promoted on the website and a copy of the 2013 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market);
• sic-fi or fantasy stories, original fiction of 4000 words max. ;
• enter on-line or via snail mail;
• $20US entry fee.

For more info or to enter the contest go to: http://www.writersdigest.com/competitions/science-fiction-writing-competition

New Posts Coming – Poetry, Short Story, Non-fiction Contests

I’ve been investigating writing contests to see what’s out there — tonnes of them. I’ve noticed that more top prizes are in the $1,000+ range — a positive change from the more typical $250 figure — and it looks like you’d need to invest an average of $25 per entry for stories ranging in the 2,000-10,000 word range.  Starting this Friday, I’ll begin weekly postings of contests I find interesting, giving the cost, prizes, deadlines and where you can find more information.

My interests are eclectic, so you’ll see genre opportunities, literary contests, and non-fiction competitions. Although I don’t write poetry, I’ll include those when I find them.

I also have a keen interest in short story collections, anthologies and novels so, when calls for those blip on my radar screen, I’ll broadcast them too.

1000-word challenge for July 1

Here’s a competition that’ll get your creative juices flowing. Harper Collins is running a short story contest, up to 1000 words, for which they are supplying 10 of the words. It costs nothing to enter, you have until July 1 to submit your piece (electronic entries), and the winner will be published in The Globe & Mail and receive $1000 worth of books. Harper Collins offers a couple of second place prizes as well. The contest promotes the company’s Collins Canadian Dictionary, First Edition.

Here is the catch: you have to use 10 of the 40 words from a list they have supplied. The list is drawn from the new dictionary and all are credited as words with a Canadian identity. (Definitions are included in the list — which is a good thing since I had no clue about some of the meanings.) Several examples: Banting, Sir Frederick Grant; bloody Caesar; bluenose or bluenoser; butter tart; chip wagon; fish and brewis; humidex; muktuk; ookpik; and Winnipeg couch. Even if you decide not to enter the contest, cobbling together a story using their list could be a great warm up for the rest of your writing day. (“My grandfather says he once shared bloody Caesars and muktuk with Sir Frederick Banting when they were stormstayed at a cocktail party. Of course, my grandfather spins a lot of yarns…”)

Your story will likely end up being very Canadian. By all means, enter the contest but also take a close look at the contract you will have to sign if you win. You give up all rights to the story in perpetuity, including all intellectual and moral rights. They can do anything they want with it, and assign its rights to anyone they want. (thank G_d for lawyers; the contract is almost as long as the story you’ll submit.)

For full details, a list of the words to be used, and a copy of the contract you’d have to sign if you win, go to: harpercollins.ca/feature/ThousandWordChallenge/contest.html

New writing group in Oakville

Author/poet Craig Murray is setting up a new writing group in Oakville. Initially, they plan to meet in Thursdays. So far 6 people are planning to attend the first session that takes place this Thursday (June 3) at “the Denny’s Across from the GO station,” says Craig. Start time is 7 p.m. The group seems to be inclusive; all levels of authorship, from beginner to published authors. Craig is looking for poets, novelists, all those bodies that can hold a pen and put their thoughts on paper for others to appreciate. His vision is for it to be more than a reading session: “I want this to be a real place of sharing and learning and fun. Gotta have fun.”

Get in touch with Craig if you want to participate or are curious: http://www.meetup.com/Oakville-Writers/

Hamilton writing contest deadline looms

If you were thinking of entering the Arts Hamilton Creative Keyboards writing contest, you have only nine days to deadline (5 p.m. on May 15).

Your submissions must be unpublished, and up to 2,00 words of short fiction. (For some reason, the word count includes the title.) Entry fee is $15 for one story, or $25 for two. The top three stories get $250, $150, or $50 respectively. You have to send your entry (with your cheque) by regular mail — no electronic submissions will be accepted. Winners will also read — or have their work read for them — at the city’s Live Lit Reading Series. Interestingly,  judging is not blind. (Good luck figuring out when the reading series is; it’s listed variously as being Sept 5, Oct 3, and sometime in “November (date and location TBC)”. If I track down the real date, I’ll post it.)

The money raised by this writing contest supports Hamilton’s annual Live Lit Reading Series.

If you want to enter, the details are at: www.artshamilton.ca/creative.html

Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out anthology – May 15

Co-editors Adebe DeRango-Adem and Andrea Thompson are looking for submissions for an anthology by and about mixed-race women. Entitled Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speaking Out, it is intended for publication this fall by Inanna Publications.

This anthology explores the question of how mixed-race women in North America identify in the 21^st Century. “We hope this anthology will become part of the discourse surrounding race and gender as they pertain to mixed-race women in this specific time in herstory, which is also one that marks the inauguration of the first mixed-race President in North American history,” Andrea says on her blog.

They want authors to send a single submission of up to 2,500 words of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, or spoken word and black & white photography by a deadline of May 15. (Originally April 15, the deadline was extended according to Adebe’s website.) They welcome previously unpublished authors.

Check out their blog for more. The submission information is at the bottom of the following page: www.race-talk.org/?p=2988.

Submissions can go to: othertonguesanthology@gmail.com

Both editors have extensive writing and performing experience.

Andrea Thompson is a performance poet who has been featured on film, radio, and television, with her work published in magazines, journals and anthologies across Canada.  Thompson’s debut collection, Eating the Seed (Ekstasis Editions, 2000), has been featured on the reading lists of the University of Toronto and the Ontario College of Art and Design. She is a pioneer of slam poetry in Canada, hosted Heart of a Poet on Bravo TV, toured her Spoken Word/Play Mating Rituals of the Urban Cougar across the country in 2008, and in 2009 was the Poet of Honor at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word.

Adebe DeRango-Adem recently completed a research writing fellowship at the Applied Research Center in New York, where she wrote for ColorLines, America’s primary magazine on race politics.  She has served as Assistant Editor for the arts and literary journal Existere, and was the 2007 York University poetry contest winner for her piece entitled “The Virtues of Love”. Adebe is also a founding member of S.T.E.P. U.P. – a poetry collective dedicated to helping young writers develop their spoken word skills.  Her poetry has been featured in sources such as Canadian Woman Studies Journal, The Claremont Review, Canadian Literature, and CV2. Her first book-length poetry collection, Ex Nihilo, was just published by Calgary-based Frontenac House.