Submission Guidelines for Knocking at the Door: a Poetry Anthology

February 15th, 2010

Knocking at the Door: Approaching the Other seeks fresh work exploring the theme of reconciling and/or coming to an understanding with the Other as it appears in all aspects of life: personal, political and societal. We want honest chronicles of your struggles to come to terms with the Other in all its forms and your sense of humor. Some of the editor’s favorite authors include Rilke, Ilya Kaminsky, Jack McCarthy and Harryette Mullen, but most of all we love poems with a unique voice of their own that defy categorization.

Think along the lines of Daphne Gottlieb in her book “Final Girl”, Margaret Atwood’s “Solstice Poem”, Paul Celan, Tess Gallagher’s “Conversation with a Fireman from Brooklyn” or Patricia Smith’s “Skinhead”. We’re less interested in poems written to reflect the woe or angst of the persona than poems reaching to understand and explore the world outside.

Submission Guidelines:

• Submissions will be accepted from February 15, 2010 to May 15, 2010
• No previously published work or simultaneous submissions, please.
• Send your submissions via an email to poetryeditors@buddhapussink.com with the subject line “Submission for Knocking at the Door from <your name>” and an attached file in .doc or .rtf format including:
  • Your name & contact information
  • A brief author bio
  • 3 – 5 poems, 10 pages maximum, single-spaced in at least 12 pt. font. We will think less of you if you use Comic Sans.
• Any submissions that do not follow these guidelines will not be considered.
• Notifications will be sent out via email in August 2010.
• Payment for publication: 2 copies of the completed anthology in which your work appears.

Send your best words our way! We read and choose writing democratically, pluralistically, ecumenically; therefore, we like to print a mix of writing regardless of its form, genre, school, or politics. We publish newcomers and established writers alike.

- Lisa Sisler & Lea C. Deschenes, Knocking at the Door Editors

Preview – “Blood In The Mobile”

By Tambay, on April 7th, 2010

<p>Blood in the Mobile Trailer from Blood in the Mobile on Vimeo.</p>

We should all be familiar with the mineral known as Coltan, variations of which can be found in numerous small electronic devices, like cell phones, PDAs, pagers, laptops, and others. You’re probably holding one of those devices in your hand right now, or will be shortly.

What you may not know is that the world gets the bulk of its supply of Coltan from the Democratic Republic of The Congo (DRC), the central African nation. By some accounts, about 80% of the world’s supply of Coltan comes from the DRC, and it is believed that exporting of Coltan from the DRC to the European and American electronics companies that make those ubiquitous devices, has helped finance present-day conflict in the DRC, which has killed an estimated 6.9 million people.

Lately, there’s been a worldwide push for the global electronics industry to take a more active role in ensuring a “conflict-free” raw minerals supply chain, encouraging an initiative to combat the problem.

 

The below documentary, titled, Blood In The Mobile, can be considered a player in that push, with its self-described mission to create awareness about the link between “conflict minerals” (like Coltan) and our electronic devices, forcing the manufacturers of these devices to keep track of their supply chain, so that they avoid using  “conflict minerals,” child labor, and stop fueling dirty wars.

The documentary film is scheduled to debut in September 2010, and the filmmakers are seeking donations to assist on that front and others. So visit their website HERE for much more info.

In the meantime, check out the 3-minute trailer below:

h/t Bombastic E

VIDEO:Haitian History & Future Prospects By UMass Professor John Bracey

0 Comments 08 April 2010

UMass Professor John Bracey presents a brief history of the country of Haiti focusing on the significant impacts Haiti has had on the world despite being isolated and ignored by most other countries. His lecture points out what needs to be done to truly help Haiti after the recent earthquake. Recorded on April 2, 2010 in the Greenfield Community College Stinchfield Lecture Hall.

Source:

From SeeingBlack.com Literature Scholars on the Mic By By Sidik Fofana—SeeingBlack.com Literature Editor Apr 8, 2010, 12:58 In his essay “‘Memory Lane’: On Jazz, Hip-Hop, and Fathers,” Mark Anthony Neal provides context for Nas’s seminal debut, Illmatic, by considering the musical journey of his father Olu Dara. He writes, “Dara’s oldest son, Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones, was born in the place affectionately known as ‘the Bridge,’ not so ironically, at a time when the ‘gumbo’ that Dara sought in his music was simmering throughout the five boroughs of New York City.” The “Gumbo,” which symbolizes Dara’s Mississippian roots as well as the melting pot of South American, Caribbean and African residents in Queensbridge, New York City’s largest public housing projects, also fits the aim of Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas's Illmatic, in which editors Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzai assemble top hip-hop scholars to dissect Illmatic into its cultural, political, literary and global components. Needless to say, much more than celebrating hip-hop’s most canonized opus, the essayists, which include Mark Anthony Neal, Marc Lamont Hill, Greg Tate, Imani Perry and others, analyze the ars poetica of Illmatic, examining the album through the bifocal lens of music and poetry and deconstructing it like a hybrid between Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Their close reading serves as a springboard into the tangential topics of fatherhood, urban decay, prison and post 9/11 New York City—the very dilemmas that make Illmatic such a stalwart work of social commentary. Almost none of the scribes in Born to Use Mics, feels reserved about elevating Nas to the level of chief ghetto scholar as evidenced by their intense decomposition of his lyrics. Marc Lamont Hill goes as far as to label Nas a celebrity Gramscian, a term borrowed from Mark Anthony Neal. In his essay, “Critical Pedagogy Comes at Halftime,” Hill writes, “Through his lyrical representations, Nas functions as an informal ethnographer by consistently offering an on-the-ground counternarrative of day-to-day ghetto life.” Hill links Nas’s storytelling rhymes to a stark but necessary kind of grassroots urban journalism. Though no discussion in this book takes precedence over another, Sohail Daulatzai’s “A Rebel to America: ‘N.Y. State Mind of Mind’ After the Towers Fell” places Illmatic within the most contemporary post 9/11 conversation. In this analysis, Daulatzai equates the first full song on the album with Gill Scott Heron’s “New York City.” Both offer the city as a symbol for the country at large. Daulatzai reiterates the common view of New York City as “the blessing and the curse, the American Eden and the forbidden fruit,” the latter of the two descriptors Nas adopts when he raps, “I think of crime when I’m in a New York state of mind.” The city is also, to bring Nas’s lyric further, the target of anti-imperialists who view New York as the figurehead behind unwarranted expansionism according to Daulatzai. Perhaps Mark Anthony Neal’s hip-hop “gumbo” can also refer to the triad of social issues (fatherhood, prison, and urban poverty) that surface in this collection. On the topic of prison, Dyson pens “ ‘One Love’ Two Brothers, Three Verses” which doubles as a companion to Nas’s memorable Q-Tip-produced track and a firsthand account of his own brother’s jail-time woes. As for fatherhood and urban poverty, the writers in this book don’t or, rather, can’t limit conversations on these matters to one piece, leaving these issues to be in infused into every piece in some form or another. Just as Nas creatively played with the cassette tape medium in 1994 when he substituted the A-side and the B-side with the 40th and 41st side, (sections of the Queensbridge projects in which he was raised), Born to Use Mic divides its writing into the 40th side, 41st side, and the remixes. Perhaps the spiciest section, the remixes, includes an original 1994 Rap Pages interview with Nas, who calls out interviewer Bobbito Garcia for passing him up on Def Jam. There is also a testimony of Tupac’s love for Illmatic rendered by Dream Hampton, and a brief exposition on Illmatic’s relevance to the movie “Wild Style” and other emblems of Hip-Hop’s nascent stages by Charlie Ahearn. This socially poignant compendium of essays transforms its essayists into emcees themselves who use their scholarly quills to tell the story of one of hip-hop’s most enigmatic albums. As Imani Perry writes, “the narrative form is a classic in Hip-Hop.” In Born Use to Mics, both the rapper and the thinkers are the ones dropping knowledge. Read and search book reviews and excerpts on SeeingBlack.com's Literature channel and archive. Click here to post a comment on this excerpt or your own literature, reviews or news. Do you shop at Amazon? Well shop through our link and support SeeingBlack.com! © Copyright by SeeingBlack.com

Bruce Dixon

Co-founder, Black Agenda Report

Posted: April 8, 2010 04:27 PM

On April 10, representatives of communities around the country will converge in D.C. to demand the firing of Arne Duncan and the reversal of the Obama administration's policies on public education. There is an unbroken line of bipartisan continuity, grassroots activists for public education say, between the education policies of Republican George Bush and Democrat Barack Obama. Even before Bush Secretary of Education Rod Paige declared teachers unions to be "terrorists," organized educators were targets in the crusade for corporate-friendly school reform.

Activists claim that the Obama administration's current "Race To The Top" awards federal education dollars to states based largely on how many public schools they disband and privatize, and how many public school teachers they fire. This wholesale dismantlement of public education and the scattering of public school workforces will have profound consequences well beyond education for inner city communities.

Most urban public school teachers actually live in and near the communities where they teach.  The majority are women, often minority women, who have struggled for years to attain advanced degrees and additional certifications.  They take part in frequent high-level instruction to hone and enhance their skills.  Even when they are not the heads of their households, they are pillars of their own families and communities, the most active members in local churches and neighborhood civic organizations of all kinds. They are well-paid enough to make mortgage payments and send their own children to college.

What happens to inner-city communities when hundreds of thousands of highly educated, superbly qualified community residents, mostly women, lose their retirement and medical benefits, find their pay cut in half, or lose their jobs altogether?  Many, in their forties and fifties won't find new employment easily or at all, and those that do will be paid less, often much less.  

Some won't be able to pay those mortgages any more. Those that find new jobs will have to travel far afield, where their distant employment won't contribute to the building of social capital that enriched the lives of their communities as their former work as public school teachers once did.  Commuting to distant jobs will mean less free time to take part in the activities of churches and local organizations that constitute the social fabric and civic life of neighborhoods.  "Every ten minutes of commuting," according to sociologist Robert Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone, "reduces all forms of social capital by 10 percent."

The current wave of what's called "school reform" is replacing these well-paid and experienced teachers, again overwhelmingly women and minorities, with a younger, whiter, less well-paid workforce with few ties to the communities where schools are located.  In Chicago hundreds of former teachers have filed a civil rights suit against former Chicago Schools CEO Arne Duncan and his successor for racial discrimination.

No Child Left Behind, and How We Got Here. 

A powerful slice of corporate America has aimed at the privatization of public education for more than a generation.  In the 70s and 80s the Bradley and Walton Family Foundations, among others, created and sustained the "charter schools movement" out of whole cloth. This "movement" was largely sustained by corporate philanthropy until the passage, with famously bipartisan support, of No Child Left Behind in 2001.  NCLB mandated the national adoption of high-stakes testing in public schools, despite mountains of evidence that such tests were routinely biased.  

NCLB required administrators to publicly brand schools with low test scores as "failing", and divert revenue from those schools to privately owned and operated charter schools and service providers, creating a booming industry of charter schools, service providers, lobbyists and the like.

There was a time and place when "school reform" meant empowering parents  to collaborate with teachers in those local schools to evaluate teacher performance and improve the quality of learning and instruction.  In the 1980s, Chicago's mayor Harold Washington acceded to the demands of the grassroots neighborhood forces that elected him, and had state and city authorities enact a radically democratic kind of school reform.  Locally elected councils of parents and rank and file teachers at each public schools were given veto power over principals' contract and over a significant chunk of budgets at their local school.  The results were uneven at first, but where genuine local participation happened, educational quality seemed to improve.   

Many professional school administrators didn't like this kind of democratic school reform, as it encroached on what had been their exclusive turf.  But by empowered parents speaking with authority on public education were a giant obstacle on the road to school privatization, the corporate-friendly version of school reform.

But just as Chicago led the nation in adopting democratic school reform, Chicago had to come up with its antidote.  For a city ruled 43 of the last 55 years by somebody named Richard Daley, this proved to be no problem.  The city never did have a citywide elected school board, and in the 1990s, it placed total and direct control of its schools in the hands of the mayor, who quickly purged it of teachers and community representatives.  

Chicago's school superintendent, an educator, was replaced by a "CEO," an accountant out of the mayor's office named Paul Vallas, and school reform from the bottom up was replaced by "reform" from the top down.  Vallas went on to be the hatchet man in similar anti-democratic school re-organizations in Philadelphia and post-Katrina New Orleans, where he used the disaster to summarily fire that city's entire school workforce and go to an almost exclusively charter school system.  This is where his successor in Chicago, Arne Duncan was coming from when he pronounced Katrina as the best thing that could have happened to education in New Orleans.  

As CEO of Chicago's public schools Arne Duncan simply disbanded whole schools on often on short notice, firing all their teachers and handing their facilities over to favored private operators.  It was a policy that went national with the election of Chicagoan Barack Obama to the White House.

Why Target Teachers and Their Communities?

From the viewpoint of school privatizers, targeting teachers makes good sense.  Public payrolls, along with medical and retirement benefits are a big part of public school budgets.  If those wages can't be cut, and those benefits avoided, there will be no profit for private charter school operators and contractors.  And let's face it, no private employer wants a large force of well-paid workers in possession of the institutional knowledge to run the place without him, and intimately connected with the local citizenry who have some claim of authority over the enterprise because it operates with public funds.  

For inner-city communities with child poverty and unemployment already at levels not seen since the Great Depression, this is the worst possible news.  There have always been poor neighborhoods. 
But economically disadvantaged communities in relatively egalitarian societies, recent scholarship indicates, don't suffer from the rates of child abuse and abandonment, crime, mental illness, drug abuse, and large scale imprisonment as communities of poor people in societies like the U.S., where the gulf between rich and poor is the largest in the industrialized world.  Lower wages, more unemployment, more poverty in unequal societies means more crime, more drug abuse, more mental illness -- more of every imaginable negative social indicator.

Firing tens or hundreds of thousands of inner-city teachers is bound to have dire long term consequences for the stability and viability of the communities where they used to work.

 -------------------------

progressiveteacher I'm a Fan of progressiveteacher permalink

Here's what I see happening. First of all - a disclaimer - I'm a teacher in a near-west suburban district, one that is very racially diverse (primarily African-American and Hispanic), very low income, and unfortunately, low-performing. A new superintendent was hired from another state (basically, a hit-man) who has fired teachers (some of our best ones!). This district has a history of having a high turnover rate, and so has been very unsuccessful in building culture. One thing that is positive about this district is the strong core of African-American teachers from the community who create their lives around the school. What I see happening in urban schools: one - cultural imperialism: well-intended white 22 year olds, with a fresh degree (not a in teaching, although certainly they could have done that, but chose not to) doing missionary work among the poor unwashed masses for a couple of years for little money but lots of street cred ("well, when I worked in the inner city school....") to build great well paying careers in educational policy or creating agendas in schools of education. This has to stop: we don't need Teach for America any longer because we no longer have a short supply of teachers. In fact, these "tourists" are taking jobs away from community members who need them - and will stay and do the real, hard work of building communities and culture.

    Reply     Favorite     Flag as abusive Posted 09:44 PM on 4/09/2010

-anachoret I'm a Fan of anachoret 49 fans permalink

Fantastic article.
As someone whose community lost both our community schools in '82, and fought hard for twenty years to get one back (which must fight for it's life every year), I remember when the charter movement started by saying how they would do much better, and cost much less. As soon as they were given a chance at public funds, they stopped their old mantra; "dumping more money on our problems won't make them go away," and started saying that all they need is more access to public money, and the problems that they were having competing with public schools would go away.
You are so right, and, in my opinion, the urban communities around the the country should understand that removing the communities strong connections with the schools is, and has been, an integral part of the culture war. it is a a more subtle form "re-education." Corporations are buying culture and re-engineering it. Not just here in the US, but all over the globe.

Further, the Democrats could care less about the urban centers, as they see the suburbs as the key to gaining political power, so long as they can hold urban centers hostage, with voters having no access to a national party that is better and more focused on urban concerns... Like revitalizing our public schools, instead of simply giving up and handing them it over to a private corporations who are angling to vacuum up public money.

    Reply     Favorite     Flag as abusive Posted 04:07 PM on 4/09/2010

-Pablo175 I'm a Fan of Pablo175 27 fans permalink

Innercity schools are failing. Changes are needed. Stop defending the Union and worry about the children.

    Reply     Favorite     Flag as abusive Posted 02:03 PM on 4/09/2010

-Bruce Dixon - Huffpost Blogger I'm a Fan of Bruce Dixon 38 fans permalink

 
See Bruce Dixon's Profile

First, the measure by which inner city schools are being judged "failures" is the imposition of a testing regime known to be biased, a high stakes testing regime in which family income is more predictive of success than any other factor. 

Secondly, nobody has ever offered any proof that withdrawing or threatening to withdraw funds from "failing" schools makes them any better, no matter how you measure the "failure" or the improvement. All the diversion of funds does is create another corrupt and unaccountable private industry lined up at the public trough.

All change is not good. These are politically engineered "failures" whose purpose has been to provide an excuse to create a profitable private industry (financed by a steady stream of tax revenue) at the expense of children, families, teachers, parents and communities.

    Reply     Favorite     Flag as abusive Posted 02:25 PM on 4/09/2010

-mypov123 I'm a Fan of mypov123 66 fans permalink

Yes, and if the Democrats stopped worrying so much about teachers unions, they would support providing vouchers to children who live in communities with failing schools.

    Reply     Favorite     Flag as abusive Posted 04:25 PM on 4/09/2010

-tbone99 I'm a Fan of tbone99 166 fans permalink

Yes, that way private schools could pick and choose the better students and leave those who have disabilities and problems to languish in under funded public schools.

Movimento Brasil

Posted: April 3rd, 2010 | Author: kamau | Filed under: music, music video | No Comments »

Movimento Brasil Long form commercial commissioned by Brazil’s Brahma beer on the launch of their beverage in the US market. Great inspiration video to watch as the mercury rises and we shed insulation layers here in the northern climes (does any one other nation know how to express muenjoyo than the Brazilians?) Awesome soundtrack, particularly for the samba and capoeria segments.

UPDATE: See also: Clip/excerpt below from the commercial describes in more detail, the roots and goals of capoeira.

Rubber Soles | 50 Years of Dr. Martens (The Musical)

Culture, Men's Fashion

|

By STEPHEN HEYMAN

| March 29, 2010, 4:45 pm — Updated: 4:36 pm -->

Dr. Martens

By the time Britain’s skinheads completed their devolution from hard-edged dandies to racist hooligans, their cherished Dr. Martens boots had gone viral. Before long, the list of D.M. devotees would span the length of the screw-up spectrum: “Mods, glams, punks, ska, psycho-hillbillies, grebos, Goths, industrialists, nu-metal, hardcore, straight-edge, grunge, Britpop” and on and on, says Martin Roach, D.M.’s de facto historian. Now, Dr. Martens is marking its 50th anniversary. To celebrate, the company has commissioned covers of 10 “cult” songs from acts like the Human League, Buzzcocks, the Pogues and even the Cold War Kids. (Full details here.) The songs and music videos drop on Thursday at drmartens.com. For an exclusive-to-T taste, watch profiles of three of the cutting-edge acts involved in the project.

Buraka Som Sistema (above)
The band comes from Lisbon, but the sound is imported from Angola, and the dance moves need to be seen to be believed. Buraka Som Sistema covers “Buffalo Stance” by the Swedish singer Neneh Cherry.

DāM-FunK
The Los Angeles-based electro funkster covers “The Things That Dreams Are Made Of” by the Human League.

The Cinematic Orchestra
This British-based electronic jazz and turntablist ensemble covers “Lilac Wine,” which Dr. Martens credits to Jeff Buckley, but which was actually written in 1950 by James Shelton and was also recorded memorably by Nina Simone.

Poets of the Calabash Festival

Date:	Sunday, April 25, 2010
Time:	7:30pm - 8:30pm
Location:	Greenlight Bookstore
Street:	686 Fulton Street

Description

Sunday, April 25, 7:30 PM
Akashic Books presents Poets of the Calabash Festival reading from So Much things to Say: 100 Calabash Poets
Featuring poets Amiri Baraka, Colin Channer, Justine Henzell, Willie Perdomo, Aracelis Girmay, Cheryl Boyce Taylor, Everton Sylvester, Linda Susan Jackson, Terese Svoboda, Meena Alexander
Introduction by Paul Holdengraber, Director of Public Programs at the New York Public Library

The Calabash International Literary Festival, which takes place in Jamaica each May, is a world-class three-day festival of readings and music that draws outstanding poets from all over the world, and especially from the Caribbean diaspora. Brooklyn independent publisher Akashic Books has been a long-time supporter of Calabash, and now presents So Much Things to Say: 100 Calabash Poets, an anthology of poets who have read at the festival over the years, with all profits from the sale of the book to be donated to Calabash. Greenlight is proud to host some of those poets tonight, representing our own Brooklyn poetry culture and the broad range of talents who are drawn to Calabash. Colin Channer will start things off with some appropriate music, and the NYPL's own Paul Holdengraber will introduce the evening.

http://www.calabashfestival.org/
http://www.akashicbooks.com/

The Current Contest

Contest #11 officially launched on March 7, 2010. Its premise is as follows:

MISUNDERSTANDING

One or more characters misunderstand an important communication of some kind. The type of communication does not matter--only that the character(s) notice/receive it and misunderstand it.

Your challenge: In at least 1,000 but no more than 5,000 words, write a creative, compelling, and well-crafted story that clearly uses the premise. If you have questions, ask us at Questions@OnThePremises.com.

Deadline: 11:59 PM Eastern Time, Sunday, May 30, 2010.

***Yes, we mean May 30th, not the 31st!***

Send your submissions to

Entries@OnThePremises.com any time between now and then. Use our template

if you like.

Entries that make the final round of judging, but do not get published, will be critiqued for free.

We will also critique non-finalists for $10

.

Please, allow your e-mail accounts to receive e-mails from Entries@OnThePremises.com or we won’t be able to communicate with you! We do not send spam, ever.

Remember our custom rules:

1) Put your name, address, and other identifying information in the body of your e-mail, and

nowhere in the attached story.

We don’t want to know who you are when we read your story.

2) Send us only MS Word (.doc), Rich Text Format (.rtf), or plain text (.txt) attachments.

No .wps files! We can’t read them.

Summer 2010 Contest Deadline: July 31, 2010

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Eligibility:

The Dream Quest One Poetry and Writing Contest is open everyone, international to all poets and writers whether published or not, regardless of experience.  Current and former employees of Dreamquestone.Com or their relatives are not eligible. Previously published poems and short stories in other contests, books, magazines, etc are accepted and welcome as long as they are original to the contest entrant.

All poems must be 30 lines or fewer, may be either neatly handwritten or typed, single or double line spacing, on any subject or theme.  All entries must be original works.

All short stories may be on any subject or theme.  For example, any fiction, non-fiction, essays, diary, journal entries and short screenplays are accepted.  Contestants will enter their short stories either neatly hand printed or typed, single or double line spacing, within a maximum of (5) pages or less.  All entries must be original works. 

You may submit entries to both the poetry contest and the writing contest, at the same time.

Multiple entries are accepted.

Fees:

The entry fee is $5.00 (US dollars) per poem.

The entry fee is $10.00 (US dollars) per short story.

These fees may be paid by mail or PayPal (online payment service).  If fee is payed online then a $2.00 transaction fee will be added per poem or story entry fee.  Each poem/story entry must be paid individually if using the PayPal payment option.  All entries will be assigned an Entry Identification Number.  This number will be mailed/emailed to you upon receipt of your contest entry and payment.  Note: The deadline to send payments/entries is July 31, 2010. Submitted poems/stories that come without an entry fee will be disqualified.  Dreamquestone.Com will not accept any foreign currencies as payment.  Cash in the form of U.S. Dollars or International money orders may be used for international entries.

If sending entry fees via mail, Dreamquestone.Com accepts cash, money orders, cashiers checks, and personal checks. All fees paid must be in the form of US dollars.

Poetry/Writing Entries Via Mail:
_____________________________________________________________________

1.  Print out the Mail in entry form.

2.  Fill out the entry form with your current and correct information.

3.  Included Poem/Short story Contest entries must be neatly handwritten or typed and submitted with poet's/writer's name, address, phone number, and email address (if applicable) in the upper left-hand corner of the entry.  Repeat method for multiple submission.

4. Include payment $5.00 for each poem along with a (SASE) Self Addressed Stamped Envelope for entry confirmation and notification.  Include payment $10.00 for each short story along with a (SASE) Self Addressed Stamped Envelope for entry confirmation and notification.

5. There are no limits to your entries.

6.  Make personal checks, cashier's checks or money orders payable to: "Dreamquestone.Com".  Cash payments are accepted, but will be sent at your own risk.  (Entries from outside the United States are fine, but entry fees must be made in US dollars.  Foreign entrants are strongly urged to use international money orders rather than personal checks).  Personal checks must be cleared-- entries will not be considered valid until they do.  Dreamquestone.Com is not responsible for lost entries or payments. 

_______________________________________________________________________

Poetry/Writing Entries Via PayPal:

1.  Please use the PayPal link on the "Enter Now!" page to enter.

2.  The entry fee of $7.00 for each poem and $12.00 for each short story submission will be entered.  (Note: Electronic submissions require a two dollar ($2.00) transaction fee to be included with the entry fee). After completing the transaction, send your entry electronically by email.

3.  Entries sent electronically must be sent as email attachments in a word processing document such as,  Microsoft Word  (.doc) or (docx), Word Perfect (.wpd) or Rich Text Format (.rtf), Open Document Format (.odt), etc. Poetry Contest Entry or Writing Contest Entry must be typed in the subject line of the email.  The information requested on the entry form can either be included in the typed Word processing document or typed into an email message body area.  If included in the Word document, entry form information should be on the first page.  The contest poem or short story entry must be on a separate page from the entry form information.  PayPal payment must be made before submitting the entry.

4.  You will have to repeat these steps for the poems/short stories you wish to enter.  

5.  There are no limits to your entries. Entrants cannot send payment by mail and submit electronically.  Either both payment and entry must be sent by mail or both must be sent electronically.  Entries will not be returned.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________ 

*Summer 2010 Contest Deadline: July 31, 2010 

All Prize Winners will be notified and posted on our internet website on August 31, 2010!

Decisions:

Judges are members of Dream Quest One -Dare to Dream Master Selection Committee.  All poems are judged on the basis of originality, creativity, characterization, artistic quality, adherence to the 30 line limit, and the ability to dream.  All short stories are judge based on originality, creative imagination, character introduction and development; plot development, adherence to the (5) page limit, and the ability to dream.  All decisions of the judges are final.

Privacy Policy:
Dream Quest One.com does not release or sell customer or contest entrant information to third parties or mailing lists, nor will you receive telephone solicitations, whatsoever. We occasionally send customer, contest entrants and members of our mailing news about Dream Quest One products and contests (no more than twice a month). You may opt out of these notices at any time by sending a request to alwest56@hotmail.com.

Rights:

All poems and stories remain the property of the artist who wrote or created them.  By submitting a poem/story for this contest, the artist may also be eligible for the publication of her or his work by Dreamquestone.Com.

Notification:

All Prizewinners will be notified by postal mail, email or by telephone. The top three winning entries, poets/writers, their names and brief biographical information will be published in the Dare to Dream pages at the Dream Quest One Poetry and Writing Contest website upon the completion of each contest run. 

For further information, contact:

c/o Andre L. West, Editor

Dream Quest One

P.O. Box 3141

Chicago, IL 60654

email us at: alwest56@hotmail.com

Enter Here