Poetry Card Contest

previous winners

Blue Mountain Arts

Announces Its Twenty-first Biannual Poetry Card Contest
Deadline: December 31, 2012
1st prize: $300 * 2nd prize: $150 * 3rd prize: $50

In addition, the winning poems will be displayed on our website sps.com.
Please read the following, then scroll down to submit your poem.

Poetry Contest Guidelines:

1. Poems can be rhyming or non-rhyming, although we find that non-rhyming poetry reads better.
2. We suggest that you write about real emotions and feelings and that you have some special person or occasion in mind as you write.
3. Poems are judged on the basis of originality and uniqueness.
4. English-language entries only, please.
5. Enter as often as you like!

Poetry Contest Rules

All entries must be the original creation of the submitting author. All rights to the entries must be owned by the author and shall remain the property of the author. The author gives permission to Blue Mountain Arts, Inc. to publish and display the entry on the Web (in electronic form only) if the entry is selected as a winner or finalist. Winners will be contacted within 45 days of the deadline date. Contest is open to everyone except employees of Blue Mountain Arts and their families. Void where prohibited.

How to Submit

Simply complete the contest form below, or if you prefer, you may send your submission via snail mail* to:

Blue Mountain Arts Poetry Card Contest,
P.O. Box 1007, Dept. E,
Boulder, CO 80306.

Poetry Contest Submission Form

10 African films

to watch out for, N°14

December 6, 2012 By Tom Devriendt 

Documentary filmmakers are better at spreading the word about their new work on the web compared to fiction directors, or there’s just more documentary films being made. (Or I’m looking in the wrong places.) Here are ten more films to watch out for. First, four fiction features: A Menina dos Olhos Grandes (“The girl with the big eyes”) is based on a popular story from Cape Verde: a “creole girl” returns from Europe to her homeland due to the sudden death of her father where she will come up against an unfamiliar reality and ghosts of her past. Trailer above. (Also check this older trailer to get another feel of the film.)

Tourbillon à Bamako (“Swirl in Bamako”).

Synopsis:

A wild chase in search of a lottery ticket through the streets of Bamako.

Film Details:

• Country: Mali
• Director: Dominique Philippe
• Production: Babel Films
• Cast: Chek Oumar Sidibé, Mama Koné, Fatoumata Coulibaly

The film’s Facebook page has a trailer.

A Lovers Call is a short film by Najma Nuriddin about Aasim, a young single Muslim man living in Washington DC who falls for a poet named Kala. The film is filed in the portfolio of Nsoroma Films, a US-based production house “of the African diaspora … dedicated to telling organic stories.” Here’s a trailer:

Elelwani is a new film by South African director Ntshavheni wa Luruli (whose film The Wooden Camera was awarded the Crystal Bear for Best Youth Feature at the Berlinale in 2004). Selling-line: “the world’s first Venda film”:

And six documentaries (made/in-the-making):

The Engagement Party in Harare is a 35mins documentary film by British/Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Piotrowska “about post-colonial identities at the Harare International Festival of the Arts in Zimbabwe.” The film features the HIFA organizers as well as Zimbabwean artists such as Raphael Chikukwa (photo left) and Tsitsi Dangaremba. No trailer yet.

Rwagasore: Life, Struggle, Hope is a film by directors Justine Bitagoye and Pascal Capitolin and producer Johan Deflander about Burundi’s struggle hero Prince Louis Rwagasore who became the country’s first Prime Minister, and was murdered a few days after the formation of his government, on October 13, 1961. According to the film’s website “the film [was] shown during the [2012] cinquentenaire festivities on July 1st at the Burundi embassy in Moscow. This mainly for the Burundese diaspora in Russia.”

Here’s a first trailer for I Sing the Desert Electric, a short film about electronic based musical phenomena occurring from Mauritania to Northern Nigeria. Cue sahelsounds:

Underground/On the Surface revolves around a new underground musical genre known as Mahraganat Shaabi which despite being rejected by the mainstream has become very popular with the youth in the streets of Cairo:

(Related: don’t miss Afropop Worldwide’s recent feature on Cairo’s musical “underground”.)

Mother of the Unborn is Nadine Salib’s first feature length documentary and looks at the challenges faced by Egyptian women unable to conceive, and subsequently face rejection by their families and stigmatization by their communities. The film tells stories of several childless women who navigate their world of rural Egyptian myths, legends, habits and traditions surrounding childbearing and infertility:

 

And in 1962: De l’Algérie française à l’Algérie algérienne (“From French Algeria to Algerian Algeria”) Malek Bensmaïl and Marie Colonna revisit French and Algerians’ moods and expectations during the seven weeks that separated the official France-Algeria cease-fire on March 19, 1962 from the first elections for the National Algerian Assembly. The film’s website has a trailer.

<p style="font-size:11px; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #808080; margin-top: 5px; background: transparent; text-align: center; width: 600px;">Watch Philadanco on PBS. See more from On Canvas.</p>

'Audacious' Black Ballerinas

Had To Be On Point

by NPR Staff

March 7, 2012

 

Listen to the Story

Download Brenda_Gottschild_Interview.mp3

Joan Myers Brown & the Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina

A Biohistory of American Performance

by Brenda Dixon Gottschild

Paperback, 340 pages | purchase

Joan Myers Brown

For more than four decades, the Philadelphia Dance Company, PHILADANCO, has opened its doors to dancers of all races. Ballerina Joan Myers Brown founded the dance studio, in spite of decades of personal struggle against deeply ingrained and often unquestioned racial barriers in the ballet world.

Brown, who is African-American, tried to take classes in the 1950s at white ballet studios in Philadelphia. But "the doors were closed to her," says Brenda Dixon Gottschild, author of Joan Myers Brown and the Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina.

Gottschild tells NPR's Michel Martin that there were some integrated dance classes in Philadelphia, taught by British choreographer Antony Tudor. He worked with Brown and eventually cast her in Le Sylphides, a classical ballet. But, Gottschild says, one local newspaper reviewed the ballet and referred to Brown and another black ballerina as "the flies in the buttermilk."

Brown went on to perform in nightclubs around the country with the likes of Sammy Davis Jr. and Cab Calloway. In 1960, she returned to Philadelphia, and eventually opened PHILADANCO. "Her community allowed her the strength to go on," Gottschild says. "She, indeed, had to deal with a city that didn't open the doors the way one would have assumed, even in the 1960s."

No justice as

Uganda female journalist

commits suicide

after gangrape

 

November 28, 2012

It is that time of the year when we dedicate 16 days to remind the world of the endless need to eliminate violence against women.
November 25 is the International Day for the elimination of violence against women. In Uganda various organisations have done a good job using different media to pass the message that ought to be the everyday message to the population.

Tweetups, SMS campaigns, radio talkshows are all on to get Ugandans to understand that violence against a woman is violence against humanity too! That you can judge a society by the way it treats its women.

A week before November 25th, I read a thread on Facebook group that I am part of. It was about a female journalist from Bukedde who had died during childbirth.

We didn’t discuss much. It was just condolence messages although I felt this was time for us to reflect how close issues we cover are to our own lives. In Uganda everyday 16 mothers die due to childbirth. This is due to complications that could be prevented. In many ways maternal health is a social justice issue.

Just as this news was sinking in, another disturbing post came up. A female journalist had committed suicide. Moreen Ndagire, whom I didn’t know personally, was a Sub-editor at a Red Pepper, a leading tabloid in Uganda. At the age of 24, she had achieved quite a lot that not many youth can do in this country with a high unemployment rate.

Moreen Ndagire at her graduation in last year. Photo from Observer.

 

The report said that Ndagire had committed suicide after she was gangraped. The rape took place in August, there’s not much detail of where but this devastation had sent Ndagire to immediately turn to attempt to take her life.

As Observer reports Ndagire was saved by relatives and then later came back to work. What was disturbing in this report is that a colleague at work even joked about the rape to Ndagire. When I tweeted about this story some people were quick to say that the use of ‘Kulika agasajja’ by a male colleague to Ndagire shouldn’t be taken as an abuse, that it wasn’t said in bad faith. However I wonder what sort of human finds it fitting to publically, in a newsroom, congratulate a girl for a surviving a rape. To me, this is unacceptable and horrific that even at work places women have no support and protection.

Ndagire walked out of her office and she returned and tried to work again the next day. According to the Observer report the Human Resource manager at Red Pepper doesn’t seem to concern herself with what an employee had faced. To her she seemed to work fine and she says they know little about her death.

Ndagire’s story is not just one; it is that of very many women who have faced rape, are abandoned by loved ones and have no fall back place much among their peers.
Rape victims in Uganda find another harrowing process trying to get an offender prosecuted. In fact most rapes in Uganda go unreported.

Even in the press report, it is not clear if there was an investigation to find the perpetrators of this crime that robbed Ndagire of her dignity and life.

After a few tweets I wondered what could be done for we shouldn’t let this young soul die in vain.

I contacted a friend, a lawyer and these were the suggestions.

“I think the matter can be followed up from Police side to see if we can see what police has done, any arrests and investigations. If nothing has been done (like I highly suspect), we can see how to raise this as a case of negligence and call police to act. Am surprised and shocked that it is not featuring anywhere in the 16 days of activism and am close to pointing fingers on why? Where is Fida, Uwonet and the numerous women organizations in this country? What are they doing about it? Can they do anything about it? Can they hire private investigators to get evidence?

For now if you are on twitter you can help send the message that a rape of a woman should not go without justice sought.

Send a tweet to @FIDAUganda, Police, @Ugandaupf , Women’s Media organization @UMWAandMamaFM , Uganda Women’s Network @uwonet

Carolina de Jesus, writer:

from the slums of São Paulo

to international acclaim

 

Originally published on November 25, 2011
Republished in recognition of the Month of Black Consciousness

 

Carolina Maria de Jesus (1915-1977) was a favelada (slum dweller) from the the city of São Paulo that gained fame in the 1960s after the release of her book Quarto de Despejo (translated as Child of the Dark) was released. Quarto would become the only book to be published in English by a favelada.

 

Born in poverty in the city of Sacramento, in the state of Minas Gerais, she left the city in 1947 and would eventually end up in São Paulo where she found work as a domestic for a very important family. Having never really adapted to life as a domestic, she migrated to a section of São Paulo near the Tietê river where she settled into the favela known as Canindé. At this time she worked as a paper collector which, although a precariousness line of work, somewhat sustained her and her family. Although Jesus had only attained a second grade education, she developed a love for reading and writing which led to the beginning of her documenting the daily cruel realities of life trying to survive in a favela.

 

Reporter Audálio Dantas was doing a report about life in the favelas when he came across the diary that Carolina was writing. Surprised with the realistic portrayal of the angst of favela life, Dantas took her writngs to an editor where it was released in 1960 under the title of Quarto de Despejo: Diário de uma favelada. The title became an instant success selling out the first order of 30,000 copies within the first week with requests for the book coming in from all over Brazil. The title would eventually be translated into 14 languages and sell over a million copies since its release.

 

Although Carolina wrote four other books, none were successful. She rose from the favelas and enjoyed a brief period of celebrity with the release of Quarto, but she would ultimately die in poverty in 1977. Today, Quarto de Despejo is still studied and held in high regard by aspiring black Brazilian writers and social scientists and Carolina is regularly celebrated as an important figure in Afro-Brazilian history.

 

Posted by Gatas Negras

 

Virginia Commonwealth University

Levis Reading Prize

Deadline:

January 15, 2013

Website: 

http://www.has.vcu.edu/eng/resources/levis_prize/levis_current.htm

E-mail address: 

englishgrad@vcu.edu

A prize of $2,000 and an all-expenses-paid trip to give a reading in Richmond is given annually for a first or second book of poetry published in the previous year. Submit a book of at least 48 pages published in 2012 by January 15, 2013. There is no entry fee. Call, e-mail, or visit the website for complete guidelines.

Virginia Commonwealth University, English Department, P.O. Box 842005, Richmond, VA 23284-2005. (804) 828-1329.

Robert Frost Foundation

Poetry Award

Deadline:

January 1, 2013

Entry Fee: 

$10

Website: 

http://www.frostfoundation.org

E-mail address: 

frostfoundation@comcast.net

A prize of $1,000 is given annually for a poem written in the spirit of Robert Frost. Submit two copies of up to three poems totaling no more than three pages with a $10 entry fee per poem by January 1. Send an SASE, call, e-mail, or visit the website for complete guidelines.

Robert Frost Foundation, Poetry Award, Lawrence Public Library, 51 Lawrence Street, 3rd Floor, Lawrence, MA 01841. Mark Schorr, Executive Director.