The gates are open on our 2012 fiction and poetry contest!
2012 Poetry Contest Judge Dana Levin
Poet Dana Levin grew up in California’s Mojave Desert and earned a BA from Pitzer College and an MA from New York University.
Levin’s collections of poetry include In the Surgical Theatre (1999) and Wedding Day (2005) and her third, Sky Burial, in (2011.) Selecting Levin’s manuscript for the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, Louise Glück praised the work as “sensuous, compassionate, violent, extravagant.” In the Surgical Theatre also won the John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares, the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the PEN/Osterweil Award.
Levin’s free-verse, image-driven poems grapple with the legacies of both Confessionalism and Language poetry by engaging and questioning the self, while using line breaks, punctuation, and syntax as primarily sound-driven tools. In a 2008 interview with the Kenyon Review, Levin noted, “[F]or me, imagination is a transpersonal force. Its products can come unbidden; when asked to be employed it is not tame, but surprises, frustrates, stuns, and confounds.”
Levin’s honors include awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Library of Congress, the Lannan Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Whiting Foundation. Her work has been widely anthologized and has won several Pushcart Prizes.
She lives in Santa Fe and teaches at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design and Warren Wilson College.
2012 poetry contest guidelines:
- All unpublished poetry manuscripts of 5 poems maximum will be considered.
- The winner will receive $750 and publication in Blue Mesa Review Issue 25, and two copies of issue 25.
- Please submit and pay $17 online to our new online submission manager
- ENTRY DEADLINE: BY DECEMBER 31st, 2011
- Submit here
2012 Fiction Contest Judge Kate Braverman
Kate Braverman is a poet and experimental writer of a singular and ruthless breed. She is author of four books of poetry, the novels: Lithium for Medea, Palm Latitudes, Wonders of the West, and The Incantation of Frida K. Her Graywolf Prize for Creative Non-Fiction award winning memoir, Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir was published in Feb. 2006.
Kate’s works have been translated to Italian, Turkish, Latvian, Japanese, French and German. Kate’s short stories and poems are widely anthologized. “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta” appears in the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Kate’s short-story “Mrs. Jordan’s Summer Vacation” won Editor’s Choice Raymond Carver Award. She received a Pushcart Prize for her short story, “Cocktail Hour. Other awards include the 2005 Mississippi Review Prize, a Christopher Isherwood Foundation Fellowship for lifetime recognition of achievement. Most Recently Kate has won the Margie J. Wilson Poetry Prize from Margie Review.
Kate has also received a Recongition Award from the California Legislature Assembly, and a San Francisco Public Library Honoree. Her certificate reads: “For your success as an influential novelist, short story writer, and poet, and for your literary acheivements that have garnered great acclaim, numerous awards and a Pushcart Prize, thereby making California a better place to live.”
Kate lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. All the rumors are true.
Fiction Contest Guidelines:
- 1st Prize = PUBLICATION in issue 25, $1,000, and 2 copies of issue 25
- Runners up will receive an honorable mention and a chance at publication.
- Entry Fee: $17
- Requirements: Original, unpublished fiction, 7000 words or less.
- ENTRY DEADLINE: BY DECEMBER 31st 2011
- Submit to our online submission manager
