2007 Poetry & Flash Fiction Winners
The flash fiction winner is Douglas Campbell for "Accidents."
The finalists were:
Jeremy T. Wilson for "Fifteen Minutes" and "Runner."
and Margaret Wycisk for "No Life Creeping Through."
The poetry contest winner is Robin Carstensen for "Invitation from Theta Park."
The runner-up is Margaret Wycisk for "Leave of Absence."
Comments from the flash fiction judge, Thaddeus Rutkowski:
"Accidents" is a fully realized story, even though it contains less than 1,000 words. It has a point: that we can't control things, that unforeseen events, some of them hurtful, will occur no matter what. The story's narrator seems obsessed with uncertainty--as it plays out in traffic patterns and in his own relationship. He seems to be bracing himself for the worst. He hits on another truth: that the future is essentially unknowable. For raising these issues in a short narrative, and identifying questions of permanence and transience common to us all, "Accidents" deserves Many Mountains Moving's Flash Fiction Award for 2007.
2007 Poetry & Flash Fiction Guidelines
NEW DEADLINE: 10/20/2007 (Sat.)
2006 Poetry & Flash Fiction Winners | 2005 Poetry & Flash Fiction Winners
2007 Poetry & Flash Fiction Contests
Eligibility:
* Open to all poets and writers whose work is in English.
* Entries may not be previously or simultaneously published.
* Staff members and family of staff members are ineligible.
Prizes:
* $200 cash prize for the best poem & $200 cash prize for the best flash fiction.
* Publication in the 2008 MMM print annual.
* Finalists in each genre will also be considered for publication.
Guidelines:
POSTMARK DEADLINE— Oct. 20th, 2007.
* Winners announced in December 2007.
* Do not put your name on your work(s). All entries will be read anonymously.
* Include in a cover letter: (i) your name, (ii) e-mail address and phone number(s), (iii) mailing address,
(iv) the title(s) and genre of your submission.* If you enter in both categories, please send them in separate envelopes.
* Mark “poetry contest” or “fiction contest” on the envelope.
* Mss. cannot be returned; do not send your only copies.
* Include an SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope) to receive the announcement of the winners.
Fees:
$10 for as many as 5 poems per entry (total submission cannot exceed 10 pages).$10 for as many as 2 flash fictions (or short-short story under 1,000 words, typed double-spaced).
Entrants may also pay $15 and get a subscription in addition to the entry fee.
Make checks payable to: Many Mountains Moving.
Final Flash Fiction Judge: Thaddeus Rutkowski
Final Poetry Judge: Anne-Marie Cusac
Send to:
Many Mountains Moving
(Poetry or Flash Fiction) Contest
549 Rider Ridge Drive
Longmont, CO. 80501
2007 Poetry Book Contest Winner selected by Yusef Komunyakaa
Ashes in Midair by Susan Settlemyre Williams, published in 2008!
"Susan Settlemyre Williams’s Ashes in Midair is a marvelous book that, at times, seems almost epic. This poet maps the elemental and the essential side-by-side, and we are drawn into the necessary fabric of these sonorous revelations. Here, opposites seem to serve each other; they make each other almost sacred. Though the poems in Ashes in Midair often excavate the otherworldly, this poignant collection also keeps us faithful to the business of this world. From first poem to last, from basic hunger to the heightened fire located in earthy desire, the moments of surrealism and shaped dualism throughout this wonderful body of work abide in leaps of faith. The accrued, urgent, penetrating beauty in these poems is a gift."—Yusef Komunyakaa
"Ashes in Midair is a four part confessional without the box, lucid monsoon of emotional harmonies, x-ray scenarios, sinister cages, racing headless between life and death, voice and shadow. Her poems read like wicked tarot prophesy, a space where entering names in a book might save one from discovering that the face of God is never a human face. Williams is truly a Queen of Wands!”
—Tim Z. Hernandez, Author of Skin Tax,
Winner of the American Book Award
“Her poems the stuff of ‘earth and nightmares,’ Susan Settlemyre Williams’s greatest gift is in controlling myriad disorientations, her renderings of even fear and madness becoming darkly beautiful translations of human experience. Ashes in Midair is a splendid, wholly mesmerizing volume.”
— Claudia Emerson, author of Late Wife, winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
"Few debut collections can claim the confidence of Susan Settlemyre Williams’s. With immense technical swagger and a nerviness that never overpowers her considerable empathy and elegiac tenderness, Williams investigates both the domestic and the strange. She is above all a spiritual writer, and—like the best such writers—understands that gnosis arrives as much through desecration as through piety. Ashes in Midair is a stirring, engrossing, and haunted book."
—David Wojahn, author of Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems, 1982-2004
How many poets are able to sift the human spirit from the ashes? In Susan Williams’ beautiful first book, even the ghostly presences felt in a world’s world of dangers are made our intimates. What is personal is offered up with such close attention that, poem after poem, we find ourselves nodding “yes.” Her fables deliver the concomitant mysteries of appearance and disappearance; they unveil the shadow of the predator while revealing the fierceness with which we long to come to terms with its purposes. These poems remind us that every work of art, even art that acknowledges despair is, ultimately, an act of hope.
—Jeffrey Levine
"The mythic and the modern speak to each other in these poems, and sometimes shout, wrestling and clinching and breaking away. Our times and all times think they have places for women—holes to bury them, pedestals to raise them again invisible, newly enveloped in patinas fashioned to be inescapable—while the work here is to break free, to answer back every time in language that strikes hammer blows from within and without. In Susan Settlemyre Williams’s writing, an earthquake drums the underworld, the empty eye is filled, and another resurrection begins, Ashes in Midair."
Gregory Donovan
author of Calling His Children Home, senior editor of Blackbird
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BIO
Susan Settlemyre Williams is the author of a chapbook, Possession (Finishing Line Press, 2007). Her poetry has appeared in Mississippi Review, 42opus, Shenandoah, Sycamore Review, the Marlboro Review, and diode, among other journals. Her poem “Lighter” won the 2006 Diner Poetry Contest and was selected for Best New Poets 2006. She holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and a JD from the University of Richmond and is book review editor and associate literary editor of Blackbird. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.
The finalists:
Rob Cook, The Undermining of the Democratic Club
Veronica Patterson, Thresh and Hold
Renato Rosaldo, Tilt
Sandra Kohler, Unnavigable River
Melissa Fondakowski, Vulnerable ApparatusSemifinalists
Seth Abramson, The Suburban Ecstasies
Marilyn Annucci, Running Low
Stephanie Brown, Domestic Interiors
Jennifer Chapis, one wing apart
Virginia Chase, Reading Electra To Sleep
Curtis Crisler, Fanatics for GeniusBrent Goodman, The Brother Swimming Beneath Me
Lisa Lewis, Vivisect
Radha Marcum, The Visual River
Carol Quinn, Apostasy
Jendi Reiter, Moments at the Feast
Angela Sorby, Bird Skin Coat
Alice Templeton, Past Eden
Chris Tonelli, The Trees Around
George Young, The Wound Dresser
Many thanks to our great final judge, Yusef Komunyakaa!
We also wish to thank all of the contest entrants and to congratulate especially the finalists and semifinalists.
Notes on the last book contest from the Poetry Editor [03/17/07]
Komunyakaa’s numerous poetry books include Pleasure
Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999 (Wesleyan University Press, 2001); Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000); Thieves of Paradise (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Neon Vernacular: New& Selected Poems 1977-1989 (1994), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Magic City (1992); Dien Cai Dau (1988), which won
The Dark Room Poetry Prize; I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Award; and Copacetic (1984).Komunyakaa has also published prose, which is collected
in Blues Notes: Essays, Interviews & Commentaries (University of Michigan Press, 2000). He also co-edited The Jazz Poetry Anthology (with J. A. Sascha Feinstein, 1991) and co-translated The Insomnia of Fire by Nguyen Quang Thieu (with Martha Collins, 1995). His honors include the William Faulkner Prize from the Université
de Rennes, the Thomas Forcade Award, the Hanes Poetry
Prize, fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Louisiana Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam, where he served as a correspondent and managing editor of The Southern
Cross. In 1999 he was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets.Currently a professor in the Council of Humanities and
Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, he has
been appointed this year as the Distinguished Senior Poet on the faculty of New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program, which includes E. L. Doctorow, Paule Marshall, Sharon Olds, Breyten Breytenbach, and Philip Levine.
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Visit www.poets.org for poems, prose, audio and more information about Yusef Komunyakaa.