Deadline: 15 February 2011
Summer Literary Seminars is announcing its annual Unified (Kenya, Montreal and Lithuania) Literary Contest, held this year in affiliation with The Walrus Magazine. We are thrilled this year to have Jayne Anne Phillips judging the fiction, and Matthew Zapruder judging the poetry.
Contest winners in the categories of fiction and poetry will have their work prominently featured online in Canada's premiere literary magazine, The Walrus, as well as published in print in a participating literary journal in the United States (TBA). Additionally, they will have the choice of attending (airfare, tuition, and housing included) any one of the SLS 2011 programs – in Montreal, Quebec (June 12 - 25); Vilnius, Lithuania (August); or Nairobi-Lamu, Kenya (December).
Second-place winners will receive a full tuition waiver for the program of their choice, and third-place winners will receive a 50% tuition discount.
A number of select contest participants, based on the overall strength of their work, will be offered tuition scholarships, as well, applicable to the SLS 2011 programs. Read the full guidelines below.
Fiction Judge: Jayne Anne Phillips was born in Buckhannon, West Virginia. She is the author of four novels, Lark and Termite (2008), MotherKind (2000), Shelter (1994) and Machine Dreams (1984), and two collections of widely anthologized stories, Fast Lanes (1987) and Black Tickets (1979). Her novel Lark and Termite was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award for fiction. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and a Bunting Fellowship. She has been awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction (1980) and an Academy Award in Literature (1997) by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has been translated into twelve languages, and has appeared in Granta, Harper’s, DoubleTake, and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. She is currently Professor of English and Director of the MFA Program at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey.
Poetry Judge: Matthew Zapruder's third book of poems Come On All You Ghosts, is out from Copper Canyon in Fall 2010. He is also co-translator from Romanian, along with historian Radu Ioanid, of Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems of Eugen Jebeleanu. He has received a William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. His poems, essays and translations have appeared in many publications, including Open City, Bomb, Slate, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Tin House, Harvard Review, Paris Review, The New Republic, The Boston Review, The New Yorker, McSweeney's, The Believer and The Los Angeles Times. In Fall 2010 he will be the Holloway Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. An editor for Wave Books and a member of the permanent faculty in the low residency MFA program at UC Riverside-Palm Desert, he lives in San Francisco.
Guidelines:
- One short story or novel excerpt, maximum twenty-five (25) pages per entry.
- No more than three (3) poems per entry.
- Only previously unpublished work can be submitted.
- Include your complete contact information (address, telephone, email address) on the manuscript. Entries are not judged blind.
- All entrants will be notified of the winners in the spring by email.
- Cover letters are not required.
- Previous First-Place winners may not re-enter.
- Online entries are preferred, but hard copies are allowed (information below).
- Deadline: February 15, 2011
Entries can be submitted electronically, to: sls.contest@gmail.com
Please state whether you are submitting poetry or fiction in the subject line (e.g. SLS Fiction/Poetry Contest)
NOTE: Please do not send payments to the above email address – we request that if you pay online you use the Paypal button found in the site.
Entries can be submitted by mail to:
Summer Literary Seminars International
Unified Literary Contest (Indicate fiction or poetry)
English Department
Concordia University
1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W.
Montreal, Quebec H3G 1M8 Canada
PAYMENT
A $20 USD reading fee must accompany each entry. Multiple entries are permissible, as long as they are accompanied by separate reading fees.
Fees can paid paid online, via Paypal, or to the address above, by cheque.
Click this button to pay the $20 (USD) Contest Fee.
NOTE: Online submissions and payments are much preferred, but if you would rather submit the hard copy and pay by cheque, please use the above address.
These are the complete contest guidelines.
Do not hesitate to contact SLS with any questions, by e-mail: sls@sumlitsem.org, or mike@sumlitsem.org – or by telephone: (514) 848-2424x4632.