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Monday Morning Markets/Jobs/Opportunities

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled
  • 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…)

Thursday’s Work-in-Progress

by Erika Dreifus on
4

It has been a busy week! And a very good one. Herewith, a few highlights. (There was actually one anti-highlight–it has to do with a negative review of my book. But especially in light of all the things that are going so well in my writing life these days, I’m trying not to focus on it. Which is not to say that you won’t hear more about it later!)

  • You know that commissioned story I keep mentioning here? Well, I finished some (small) requested revisions for it last weekend. So if everything goes smoothly, it shouldn’t be too long before I can share it with you. I really can’t wait!
  • A few days ago, I sold a rant-like essay that I’ve been working on for awhile, too. I’ll let you know when the piece is online.
  • I’ve been working hard on polishing and practicing the speech I’ll be giving at my home congregation tomorrow evening. The title is “Why Is This Jewish-American Writer Different from (Some) Other Jewish American Writers?” (For those who may not be familiar with the tradition, the title plays on an essential line in the Passover Haggadah.) I hope to be able to turn the text into an essay, too. We’ll see.
  • Last, but not least, last Sunday I had the privilege of meeting with the Jewish Historical Society of New York City. Since it was a local event, some members of my fan club were able to attend (including my parents and my niece, pictured below). Much of my presentation focused on the work of other “third-generation” writers who are grandchildren of refugees from and survivors of Nazi persecution. If that subject sounds familiar, that may be because you’re thinking of a piece I wrote earlier this year for Fiction Writers Review. In Sunday’s talk, I updated that material to include mentions of Natasha Solomons’s new novel and Julie Orringer’s work-in-progress, as well as incorporating some remarks about and poems by Jehanne Dubrow and Erika Meitner. I wrapped up the presentation with a brief reading from my own book of short stories, Quiet Americans.

    • All of this and a “day job,” too? I know. Especially since things have been extra-intense at that job lately, I am really looking forward to the Thanksgiving mini-break!

    The Wednesday Web Browser for Writers

    by Erika Dreifus on
    3
  • Eavesdrop on an intense discussion among litmag folks concerning the practice of charging fees for online submissions.
  • Sometime over the past couple of days, I was clued into the redesign of the Welcome Table Press website. So I clicked over to take a look. Among the finds there: the text of Jerald Walker’s superb essay, “The Suspension of Belief: On Being a Practitioner & a Teacher of the Essay in the Age of Skepticism.” I recall being enraptured by Walker’s presentation at the first Welcome Table Press symposium on the essay in April 2010, and I’m so glad to have the essay in pdf.
  • One fiction writer nears her MFA graduation. Check out her thesis–and reflections thereon.
  • Thinking about making the switch to freelancing? Do the math.
  • Quick profile of Amina Gautier, author of the new, Flannery O’Connor award-winning story collection, At Risk. (I’ve been looking forward to this book–I was awed by a story of Gautier’s that I read a few years ago in The Chattahoochee Review. (h/t @Dolen)
  • Also TBR: Don DeLillo’s new story collection, The Angel Esmerelda. (h/t @davidbcrowley)
  • Some thoughtful ideas on “Diversionary Tactics, or How to Lose Your Readers.”
  • Last, but not least: the November Jewish Book Carnival is online, replete with links to news, reviews, and interviews featuring Jewish books & authors.

    • Monday Morning Markets/Jobs/Opportunities

    by Erika Dreifus on
    Disabled
  • New opportunity: “The John E. Nance Writer-in-Residence [Program] at Thurber House is dedicated, by his wife, Sally Crane, to the memory of the late photojournalist and author who was a critically acclaimed Associated Press photographer and journalist. AP Bureau Chief in the Philippines, Nance wrote The Gentle Tasaday about a primitive tribe in the Philippines as well as Lobo of the Tasaday, a Horn Book Award Honor Book. Nance was a Thurber House writer-in-residence twice, in 1995 and 1998. An annual residency of four weeks, the Writer-in-Residence program is designed to provide a writer with the gift of time to develop his/her work-in-progress. The residency is a two-bedroom apartment in the boyhood home of author and New Yorker cartoonist, James Thurber. Each year the residency will focus on a specific genre, the first for 2012 being nonfiction in honor of Nance’s field.” Open to U.S. citizens, 18 years of age or older, who have had a book published by a traditional publisher in the past three years or have a work under contract. Residency will take place in September-October 2012 and will offer a stipend of $4,000. Application deadline: March 15, 2012. No application fee.
  • From Ladies’ Home Journal: “For the first-ever LHJ Personal Essay Contest, we’re looking for first-person narratives of personal growth — a term you can interpret as broadly as you like. Whether you choose to write about a life lesson you learned the hard way or a challenge you managed (or perhaps failed) to meet, no topic is off-limits. And you could win $3,000 and have your essay published in LHJ.” Deadline: December 13, 2011. No entry fee indicated, BUT take note of these lines in the fine print: “By entering and/or providing the required registration information, you acknowledge that Sponsor may send you information, samples, or special offers it believes may be of interest to you about its publications or other complementary goods offered by Sponsor. Sponsor may also include your name and postal address in postal address lists that Sponsor sells or rents to third parties for marketing purposes….IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO SHARE YOUR INFORMATION, PLEASE DO NOT ENTER THIS PROMOTION.” (original emphasis)
  • Opportunity for emerging poets in the five boroughs of New York City: Four Way Books invites you to “consider submitting your first or second poetry collection to us through our new ‘It’s No Contest’ Program. We will read your manuscript with a mind to selecting it for publication until December 15, 2011. FWB editors hope to find one or more manuscripts to publish between fall 2012-2013.” No fee.
  • “Creative writers whose work in any genre reflects a keen awareness of the natural world and an appreciation for both scientific and literary ways of knowing are invited to apply for one-week residencies at the H.J.Andrews Experimental Forest [Ore.]. The mission of the Long-Term Ecological Reflections program is to bring together writers, humanists and scientists to create a living, growing record of how we understand the forest and the relation of people to the forest, as that understanding and that forest both change over time.” No application fee. Deadline: December 1, 2011 (received).
  • The University of Missouri seeks an Editor, Internal Communications; the Writers Guild of American, West (Los Angeles), is looking for a Senior Writer/Editor, and the Associated Press (New York) invites applications for a Social Media Editor.
  • From Nanyang Technological University (Singapore): “The Division of English at NTU seeks to fill a tenure-track position in Creative Writing at the Assistant Professor level. Fiction, creative non-fiction, play-writing and screen-writing are areas of particular current interest. The Division of English at NTU is an academic department in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, which offers the B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in literary studies. Students can minor in creative writing, and creative writing options are also available at postgraduate level.”

    • Thursday’s Work-in-Progress

    by Erika Dreifus on
    Disabled

    Right now, most of my writing time is going toward the drafting and revising of a talk I’ll be delivering next week at my home congregation in New Jersey. The presentation’s title is “Why Is This Jewish-American Writer Different from (Some) Other Jewish-american Writers?” I’m trying to articulate some things that I’ve been thinking about for a very long time. And it isn’t easy.

    I spent a lot of time last weekend toiling on this talk, and I’ve spent many hours outside my 9-5 workdays this week working on it, as well. I am beginning to see some light at the end of this particular tunnel.

    The light began to shine when I realized that if and when I turn this talk into an essay, I’ll be able to revise, cut, and expand, as appropriate. It may sound silly, but this realization somehow lifted a heavy burden.