Have a Good One: A Profile of Anselm Berrigan
For Anselm Berrigan, whose fourth book of poems, Free Cell, is just out from City Lights, the work that pays the bills is in frequent opposition to the work that fills the page.
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Genre: Poetry
Deadline Extended for Ten-thousand-dollar Lesbian Writers Fund Grants
The Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice has pushed its deadline for grants to emerging lesbian poets and fiction writers to July 15. U.S. writers who wish to apply for one of two ten-thousand-dollar grants from the Lesbian Writers Fund must have published literary work at least once in a newspaper, magazine, literary journal, or anthology, but must not have published more than one book.
A third grant will be given to a writer west of the Mississippi, sponsored by Skip's Sappho Fund (established by a bequest from Skip Neal, a lesbian artist and patron of the arts). Astraea will grant two finalists in each genre fifteen hundred dollars each, and honorable mention prizes of one hundred dollars will also be awarded.
"Too often, lesbian writing is marginalized by literary venues and funding sources, resulting in exceptionally talented artists unable to receive the nurturing and support so vital to their craft," the organization stated in a press release announcing the deadline extension. "The Lesbian Writers Fund is attempting to remedy this— and with good results. A former grantee used her award to purchase a computer, and no longer had to write by hand, and another attracted the attention of a prominent agent who facilitated the publication of her first novel."
By next Wednesday, interested writers need to submit a work sample and a one-paragraph anonymous biography focused on writing accomplishments and goals, along with an application, available on the Astraea Web site. Grantees will be announced by January 31, 2010.
Can Flarf Ever Be Taken Seriously?
Almost a decade after its creation, the experimental poetry movement Flarf—in which poets prowl the Internet using random word searches, e-mail the bizarre results to one another, then distill the newly found phrases into poems that are often as disturbing as they are hilarious—is showing signs of having cleared a spot among the ranks of legitimate art forms.
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Taking Poetry Public
Adam Robinson started the outdoor journal Is Reads to offer the citizens of Baltimore an unusual venue for poetry—the city itself.
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Wake Up, Fiction Writers! May Is Full of Story Contests
National Poetry Month is almost over. We laughed; we cried; we read and, perhaps, wrote some good poems. But now that the month-long verse extravaganza is nearly at an end—although it never really ends for the poets out there, does it—attention turns to the other genres as well. So, perhaps it's time to point out that fiction writers have a number of opportunities during May to enter contests in which prizes are given for short stories.
For the procrastinators out there, tomorrow is the deadline for three contests, all of which offer a thousand dollars and publication. The Journal's Short Story Contest is given for a single short story, Lee K. Abbott will judge; Leapfrog Press's Fiction Award is given for an entire manuscript of stories (or a novel or novella) and will be judged by three Michaels (Michael Graziano, Michael Lee, and Michael Mirolla), and the Southwest Review's David Nathan Meyerson Prize for Fiction is given for a single story and is open only to writers who have yet to publish a book.
For those who want to plan a bit further ahead, the deadline for Hunger Mountain's Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize is May 10. The author of the winning story receives a thousand dollars and publication.
May 15 is the deadline for the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition, the well-defined prize given annually for a story writer whose fiction hasn't appeared in a nationally distributed publication with a circulation of five thousand or more.
And even though it falls on a Sunday, May 31 is the deadline for three short story-related contests: the University of Georgia Press's Flannery O'Connor Awards, Glimmer Train Press's Short Story Award for New Writers, and The Writer's Short Story Contest.
Pass-Along Poems
Spread the word about debut poets and their work with this Pass-Along Poems chapbook. Print, assemble, and bind several handcrafted, saddle-stitched editions. Add your recommendations for first-time poets on the back pages, and while you’re at it, paste in your own polished, unpublished work or that of others you admire.
Poetry Makes Strange Bedfellows
By presenting seventy-three poets, all of whom the editors believe constitute what Charles Bernstein famously called "official verse culture" as well as its unofficial, avant-garde counterpart, the new anthology American Hybrid strives to showcase the diversity of contemporary American poetry while also revealing the unusual affinities within it.
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Q&A: April Ossmann’s Alice James Fix
April Ossmann, who recently stepped down as executive director of Alice James Books, the Farmington, Maine–based nonprofit cooperative poetry press founded in 1973, spoke about her time at Alice James from her home in Post Mills, a snowy hamlet in eastern Vermont.
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Dear (Hypothetical) Reader: An Interview With Lucia Perillo
Award-winning poet Lucia Perillo would just as soon surrender the idea of a readership altogether and focus on what truly matters—great poetry.
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Q&A: Dan Chiasson Chooses Carefully
Dan Chiasson, who last fall succeeded former poet laureate Charles Simic as a poetry editor of the Paris Review, recently spoke—by phone from a New York City taxicab—about his new role at the venerable journal.
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