Erika Dreifus

• Big news from Milkweed Editions about a new poetry prize: “The Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry is an annual regional prize, presented in partnership by Milkweed Editions and the Lindquist & Vennum Foundation. Established in 2011 with the aim of supporting outstanding Midwestern poets and bringing their work to a national stage, the prize will award $10,000 as well as a contract for publication to the author of the winning manuscript. The winner will be selected from among five finalists by an independent judge.” NB: “Submissions for this regional prize will be accepted only from poets currently residing in the Upper Midwestern United States, defined as: North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin.” No entry fee indicated. Submissions for the 2012 prize must be received by January 31, 2012. (via Poets & Writers)
• The latest Ploughshares newsletter contains this reminder: “We are on the hunt for Patricia Hampl’s Fall 2012 all-nonfiction issue. Submit online or via regular mail. The regular reading period ends on January 15th, so please polish and send in those essays soon.” NB: If you submit online and you don’t subscribe to the journal, you must pay a fee. No fee for postal submissions. Ploughshares pays “upon publication: $25/printed page, $50 minimum per title, $250 maximum per author, with two copies of the issue and a one-year subscription.”
• “The African American National Biography continues to look for writers for entries to appear in regular updates to its online edition. All entries are assigned at 500 or 750 words and are paid at an honorarium of 10 cents a word. The AANB, a joint project of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University and Oxford University Press, was published in an eight-volume print edition of 4081 entries in January 2008, under the editorship of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. It is now published online, with occasional (though infrequent) print spin-offs. We look to include not only great and famous African Americans, but a selection that will be representative of a diverse range of African Americans in all fields, from all periods of North American history, and from all stations of life: activists, writers and journalists, slaves, sharecroppers, domestic workers, musicians, performers, singers, politicians, government workers, judges, lawyers, ministers, preachers and other religious workers, educators, athletes, sports figures, actors, directors, filmmakers, doctors, nurses, artists, photographers, business people, entrepreneurs, military personnel, scientists, philanthropists, dancers, frontiersmen and women, cowboys, legendary figures, inventors, aviators, explorers, astronauts, and more.”
• Via @GinaFrangello: “Publicists, editors, agents, writers: The Nervous Breakdown Fiction Section is booking Featured authors with books released Jan, Feb, March.” NB: That’s all I know about this opportunity, but I suggest that anyone interested check out The Nervous Breakdown and its guidelines.
• If you’re a short-story writer AND a citizen of a Commonwealth country, you may want to consider entering the Commonwealth Short Story Prize competition, “awarded for the best piece of unpublished short fiction (2000-5000 words). Overall and regional cash prizes. No entry fee indicated. Deadline: November 30, 2011.
• Attention, undergraduates (enrolled full-time in U.S. and Canadian colleges). The Lyric’s College Poetry Contest will award $500 (first prize), $100 (second prize), and publication for original, unpublished poems, “39 lines or less, written in English in traditional forms, preferable with regular scansion and rhyme.” Submission deadline: December 1, 2011. No entry fee.
• Emory University (Atlanta) seeks a Staff Writer, the Josephson Institute (Los Angeles) invites applications for an Associate Web Producer/Writer, and Spread the Word (“inspiring London’s writers” in the U.K.) is looking for a Director.

Lots of teaching jobs follow after the jump. (more…)