English Department Writing Contests Deadline: March 7

Department of English 2014 Writing Contests:

Jon Scott Nelson Freshmen Creative Writing Contest

This contest is open to all WVU freshmen. Prizes are awarded for first ($75), second ($50), and third place ($25). Creative writing only. Please submit one entry in fiction, creative nonfiction, or poetry (a poetry entry should be 3-5 poems; a prose entry no more than 20 pages).

Jon Scott Nelson First-Year Writing Award

All students enrolled in English 101 (or English 103) during either the Fall 2012 or Spring 2013 semesters are eligible with up to three prizes awarded annually ($50 each). Please submit one essay written in an English 101 (or 103) class.

Jon Scott Nelson Professional Writing and Editing Award

This contest is open to all students enrolled in PWE courses. All essays must have been written for English 301, 302, 303, 304, and/or 305 for the 2012-13 academic year. Up to three prizes will be awarded (up to $50 each). An entry should be no more than 10 pages but may include more than one piece of professional writing.

Waitman Barbe Creative Writing Contest

This contest is separated into three divisions (fiction, poetry, and non-fiction) and is open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors only. One prize ($75) and one honorable mention ($50) are awarded in each division. Please submit one entry in fiction, creative nonfiction, or poetry (a poetry entry should be 3-5 poems; a prose entry no more than 20 pages). This contest is funded by the James Paul Brawner Endowed Writing Award Fund.

James Paul Brawner Expository Writing Contest

This contest is separated into three divisions—English 102, undergraduate writing (including English 103 and all WVU classes), and graduate writing from any course at WVU. First ($75), second ($50), and third ($25) place awards are normally awarded for each division. Please submit one example of expository writing from any class taken at WVU during 2012-13. Students may not submit more than one entry per division.

Russ MacDonald Graduate Creative Writing Contest

This is the only creative writing contest solely for WVU graduate students. Generally, three prizes are awarded annually ($75 each). Please submit one entry in fiction, creative nonfiction, or poetry (a poetry entry should be 3-5 poems; a prose entry no more than 25 pages). This contest is funded by the James Paul Brawner Endowed Writing Award Fund.

Appalachian Writing Award

This contest is open to all undergraduate students at WVU who grew up in Appalachia, which includes all of West Virginia, and whose work is set in Appalachia. The student will receive a scholarship ($350 value) to the West Virginia Writers' Workshop, which features writers of national reputation and will be held July 17 to July 20 in Morgantown. Submit one story or essay (up to 25 pages) or five poems. This contest is funded by writer Dwight Harshbarger.

Deadline for all contests: Friday, March 7, 2014 at 12:00 p.m. in 100 Colson Hall

All submissions must have been written for classes at WVU; doctoral dissertations and MA theses not eligible. Students' names should be omitted from the entries. Attach a cover sheet to the entry which lists: name, local address, email address, local telephone number, class rank (fr, soph, etc.), 700 number, title of entry, and name of contest entering (be sure to specify which division within the contest if applicable), and instructor/class for whom the paper was written. Students’ entries will be disqualified if information is missing from cover sheet. Winners will be notified by April 14 and will be invited to the Department’s annual Awards Luncheon held on Wednesday, April 16. Any WVU student is eligible for these contests; however, the student’s entry must have been written while the student was enrolled at WVU. Students may not submit the same entry for more than one contest or more than one entry per contest. For more information, email Marsha Bissett at Marsha.Bissett@mail.wvu.edu

No entries submitted after the deadline will be accepted.

A Reading You Don't Want to Miss

 

Maggie Kinder News

The Tenants were delighted to learn that Maggie Kinder, one of our talented and delightful English majors, has had a version of her capstone paper on Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides accepted for presentation in March at the Undergraduate Conference on English Language and Literature at the University of St. Francis. The Tenants congratulate Maggie and give a special shoutout to Katy Ryan, who was Maggie's instructor in English 496, the Senior Thesis class.

Here's your big chance

Do you read The New Yorker or The New York Times or The New Republic or The LA Times or Slate? Or maybe you listen to NPR or frequent the Poetry Foundation website? Or maybe you're just in the know?

Probably you are.

And in that case, you're already aware that our 2014 Summer Seminar workshop leader, Marta Werner, is all over the place right now on account of her new book, co-edited with poet and artist Jen Bervin, of Emily Dickinson's envelope poems.

The Gorgeous Nothings.

Is that a great title or what??

And you, yes you!, can meet the very amazing Marta and study with her right here in Morgantown in June! What are you waiting for? How often does this kind of opportunity come along?

If you're like us, you're snowed in anyway. You might as well think about June and read some poems and send in your registration right this very minute.

A Poem on the Occasion of the Polar Vortex

How often does one get to write that sort of subject line? Not often, that's how often. Thus, for this historic deep freeze, a poem you surely know… but have you read it lately? Hmph. I thought not. Quick now: make amends.


The Snow Man
    Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

And for those of you who enjoy matters of prosody (by which I mean: everybody), I highly recommend Robert Pinksy's The Sounds of Poetry, which includes a discussion of the metrical felicities of this poem: "variations in degree of accent, variations in difference between an unaccented syllable and an accented syllable, and a varying play between accent and duration all have a part in creating the rhythm" of this single sentence flowing "inside and across lines." Isn't that nice?! Perfect cozy reading for a polar vortex. 

A Very Colson Christmas, Part 2

As you can see from the following artist's rendering, Sarah and Piers were successful in their search for a Christmas tree, and we've now got it up and decorated. Note how excited the graduate students are:

A Very Colson Christmas. Part 1

We're a bit behind this year, but we should have the place decorated for the holidays very soon. In fact, Professors Sarah Neville and Piers Brown were just sent off to get us a Christmas tree....

 

...since they seem to have found a lot that sells partially pre-decorated trees, it shouldn't be too long before we get it up in the Great Hall.   

 



 

Bonnie Wheeler Summer Research Fellowship for Women Medievalists

The deadline for the Bonnie Wheeler Summer Research Fellowship for 2014 is January 31, 2014. The fellowship is designed to support the research of women medievalists below the rank of full professor. The $10,000 award is to be used during the period of June 1–December 31, 2014.

Eligibility: Applicants must be women who hold a Ph.D. in any area of medieval studies and who are full-time faculty in an academic department in the U.S. Preference will be given to candidates who are “caught in the middle” in the promotion ladder, as described in the MLA report “Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey.” Budgets for Fellowship applications should include not only research costs, but also the costs of freeing up applicants’ time--for example, relief from summer teaching, daycare and/or eldercare expenses, and the like. Candidates from previous years are welcome to reapply.

Mentoring: A special feature of the Fellowship is that it will connect the recipient with a mentor in her scholarly field.

Timetable: The application period is from October 1, 2013 through January 31, 2014. Completed applications must be received no later than January 31, 2014. The award will be announced February 28, 2014.

Application Procedure: Please see the Application Instructions on the website (bonniewheelerfund.org) for details.

Wanted: Authors to Read Their Food-Related Works

By way of background, the following appeal came to the Tenants via Jeremy Justus, one of our doctoral alums, who is a colleague of Professor Landrigan. Participation is worth contemplating, if only for the name of the January event alone:

 

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Allow me to introduce myself: I'm Marissa Landrigan, creative nonfiction writer and Assistant Professor of Writing at the University of Pittsburgh - Johnstown, and I'm seeking writers to participate in a new food-themed reading series I'm curating.
 

Acquired Taste is a series of public readings in various locations around Pittsburgh, each featuring 3-4 authors reading their work around a food-related theme. Our first event will be held at East End Book Exchange in December, and future events are lining up at local food shops, bars, music venues, and more.

I'm looking for writers who may be interested in participating in the series to submit work, most urgently to our upcoming event tentatively scheduled for January 15th at The Shop (a studio space/music venue in Bloomfield) on the theme of "Punky Foodster: Readings on Food, Sex, and Rock and Roll," which will also feature live performances by several local Pittsburgh bands.

The work may be in any genre -- fiction, nonfiction, journalism, and poetry are all welcome, but pieces should be around or under 15-20 minutes long. The work may also, of course, have been previously published, or under consideration for publication.
 

Themes are meant to be interpreted as broadly or narrowly as each writer likes, and do not need to be taken literally. My hope is that this will be a playful reading series, one that welcomes humor, smut, irreverence, etc. One that makes food tasteful or tasteless. One that engages our audience's imagination to make them salivate, and to extend our ideas of what "food writing" looks like.

Please feel free to get in touch with me (mkl18@pitt.edu) with any questions, submissions (for this or future events), or just to express interest in being notified about future calls for submission to the reading series. 

Calliope Accepting Submissions

 

Calliope, WVU’s undergraduate literary journal, is now accepting submissions!

Are you an aspiring writer, poet, or artist? Would you like to be published in an award-winning journal? If so, then this is for you! Calliope is now accepting submissions in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and artwork for this year’s edition. Each submission should include your name, major, and MIX email address. Additionally, prose pieces should include a fiction or nonfiction designation. For more information, check us out on Facebook or creativewriting.wvu.edu/calliope.

Thanks, and we look forward to seeing your work!
　

 Submission guidelines

Prose 
2000 words per entry3 entries per person
fiction or nonfiction

 Poetry500 words per entry
5 entries per person

Artwork
3 entries per person

DEADLINE: DECEMBER 15 2013

submit online at: creativewriting.wvu.edu/calliope