Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest

2012 Guidelines

Deadline: May 31, 2012  
Reading Fee: $17

* * * We prefer that entries for this contest arrive NO SOONER than March 1 since this contest comes right on the heels of the MSR Poetry Book Award. * * *

PRIZE: Winner receives $500 and 50 copies of chapbook and a one year subscription to The Main Street Rag. All entries receive a copy of the winning manuscript and are considered for publication.

Runners-up will be offered publication as well as a one year subscription to The Main Street Rag.

Every manuscript entered will be considered for publication .

Send between 24 and 32 pages of poetry, any style/form, no more than one poem per page. Please use 12pt type using Arial or Times New Roman.

Do Not Include Dedication and/or Credits/Acknowledgements Pages in entry.
For the purpose of fairness, it is important that judges know as little about the author as possible and these pages are not relevant to the judging process. If they should accidentally slip through the registration area, the author will not be eligible to win.

Include cover sheet with author’s contact information--name, address, phone number, and email address. The author's name should not appear anywhere else in the manuscript.

No manuscripts will be returned, so please do not send oversized SASEs. We prefer to notify by email, but if an author wants to use an envelope, please use a business-size (#10) envelope.

For notification of receipt of manuscript, entries can include a post card, but if they include an email address, we will send a verification of receipt via email.

Do not send anything USPS Return Receipt or Signature Receipt--we won't stand in line for these items and they will eventually be returned to you (when the US Postal Service gets tired of putting cards in our box). If you need confirmation that we received it, include a reliable email address or a stamped return post card.

Although MSR frowns on simultaneous submissions for our magazine, it is acceptable for our book contests. Upon notification, however, winner must immediately withdraw his/her mss from consideration elsewhere (or from the MSR Chapbook Contest--if the manuscript has been chosen winner in another contest).

All checks should be made payable to Main Street Rag, PO BOX 690100, Charlotte, NC 28227-7001.

Since our goal with our contest is to select manuscripts for publication, we no longer disqualify manuscripts that do not follow guidelines exactly. They will still be considered for publication; however, they will not be eligible to WIN the contest.

The most common reason for disqualification (in the past) has been the inclusion of acknowledgments and author's credits. We try to catch these pages and discard them before the manuscripts get to readers since we prefer to have a blind reading. Unfortunately, they sometimes get missed. Rather than lose out on an opportunity to publish a good manuscript, we've decided to continue the judging, but eliminate the possibility of a cash prize for those who do not follow the guidelines.

 

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Email Submission Instructions

Main Street Rag does allow for email submissions, but the guidelines are even more specific, so please read them carefully before choosing this method and give yourself enough time to prepare the manuscript file properly.

Guidelines for email submissions

 

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Mailing Instructions:

All checks should be made payable to Main Street Rag, PO BOX 690100, Charlotte, NC 28227-7001.

We recommend using US Postal Service Media Mail (within the US), but that takes longer to arrive, so DO NOT send it Media Mail if you are mailing it on or near the deadline. Why? because we distribute the LAST manuscripts to first round readers on June 8. Anything that has not arrived by the day before (June 7) will be excluded and the check returned in the SASE (if one has been provided--otherwise, it will be shredded).

DO NOT use clips or binding of any kind. We have THOUSANDS of clips here from years of submissions and we remove anything that comes in a binder and throw away the binder. If you want to pay for a binder and the shipping to get it here only to have it thrown away, that's your choice. It will not go to any readers in a binder of any kind.

DO NOT send anything that must be signed for (Signature Receipt or Express Mail) since it means having to stand in line to receive it (and we won't). And please don't use FED EX to send anything to our physical location since their local drivers are literacy challenged (they don't read instructions and we may not receive what you send as a result).

 

Contest Recommendations

Call for Papers:

The 31st West Indian

Literature Conference

The 31^st Annual Meeting of the West Indian Literature Conference will be hosted by the Caribbean Literary Studies Program at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. It will take place on October 11-13, 2012. The conference theme is “Imagined Nations, 50 Years Later: Reflections on Independence and Federation in the Caribbean.” The deadline for submissions is March 15, 2012.

Description: In 2012 Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica will celebrate the 50^th Anniversary of their independence from Britain. However, while 2012 marks these very auspicious occasions, it is also the 50^th anniversary of the collapse of the West Indies Federation. Anniversaries encourage and even demand reflection and re-visitations of the expectations, opportunities lost and those well used, the failures and achievements as well as the considerations that attended these occasions.  For more than fifty years, novelists, poets, visual artists and other cultural workers have been actively involved in imagining, revising and challenging the project of independence and the future it promised for so many. The 50^th Anniversary is an excellent opportunity to revisit the movement towards and attainment of independence; the arts movements that emerged out of these nationalist projects; the cultural institutions that gave expression to the changes taking place; the rise and collapse of the West Indian Federation and the implications of all of these developments for the Caribbean region in the new era of globalization. Moreover, this occasion provides an important critical crossroad for us to consider the extent to which dialogues about independence and Federation have preoccupied not only writers, but also artists working in a number of different mediums in the Caribbean region. To this end, the University of Miami has proposed that the 31^st West Indian Literature Conference invites writers, cultural practitioners and scholars to submit papers that engage a wide range of critical perspectives on the various representations of both independence and the rise and fall of the West Indian Federation.

Papers are invited that consider these and other themes and topics: Cultural Performance and the Politics of Nation; Literary Nationalism in Trinidad and Jamaica; The Architecture of Independence; Narrative Intentions: Mapping the Landscapes of Independence; Bodies of (In)difference: Gender, Sexuality and Nationhood; Flexible Citizens, Rigid Borders: Migration and Diaspora; Pan-Caribbean discourses of regional integration; States of Independence – Puerto Rico and the US; Political Leadership: Past, Present and Future; Caribbean Women’s Literature: Configuring of a political voice/space; New artistic articulations and revisions of the (post)independence project; Rhythm-Nations: Music, Poetry and Performance; Pedagogies of Independence; Colonization in Reverse: Caribbean and Britain; Comparative Contemplations: Decolonization in the French, Hispanic and Dutch Caribbean; Religion, Magic and Cultural Syncretism

The organizers welcome abstracts of 250-500 words in length. Abstracts should include name, academic affiliation and contact information, and should be sent to westindianliterature@gmail.com

[Many thanks to Michael Bucknor for bringing this call for papers to our attention.]

Shown above: Flag of the now-defunct West Indies Federation.

For more information, see http://www.as.miami.edu/cls/conferences.html

His Story:

A Writer of Words and Music

By DWIGHT GARNER

Published: January 9, 2012

 

 

When the poet, novelist, piano player and spoken-word recording artist Gil Scott-Heron died unexpectedly last May, at 62, he left behind a prickly and galvanizing body of work. His best songs — “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” “Whitey on the Moon,” “We Almost Lost Detroit” — are rarely heard on classic-rock radio; they’re too eccentric and polemical and might kill a workingman’s lunchtime buzz. But they’ll still stop you in your tracks.

 

 

THE LAST HOLIDAY

A Memoir

By Gil Scott-Heron

Illustrated. 321 pages. Grove Press. $25.

Related

• Lives: Pieces of a (Very Young) Man (January 1, 2012)

 

 

 

Gil Scott-Heron, poet, novelist, pianist and spoken-word artist.

Leave it to Scott-Heron to save some of his best for last. This posthumously published memoir, “The Last Holiday,” is an elegiac culmination to his musical and literary career. He’s a real writer, a word man, and it is as wriggling and vital in its way as Bob Dylan’s “Chronicles: Volume One.”

The Dylan comparison is worth picking up on for a moment. The critic Greil Marcus coined the phrase “the old, weird America” to refer to the influences that Mr. Dylan and the Band raked into their music on “The Basement Tapes.” In “The Last Holiday” Scott-Heron taps into the far side of that older and weirder America — that is, the fully African-American side. This memoir reads a bit like Langston Hughes filtered through the scratchy and electrified sensibilities of John Lee Hooker, Dick Gregory and Spike Lee.

For a relatively slim book, this one gets a lot of things said, not just about Scott-Heron’s own life but also about America in the second half of the 20th century. It encompasses Chicago, where he was born in 1949. There are sections in rural Tennessee, where he went to live with his grandmother after his Jamaican father abandoned the family to play professional soccer in Scotland. A few of these Tennessee passages are nearly as lovely as anything in James Agee’s prose poem “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.” Later Scott-Heron’s mother uprooted him to the Bronx.

This book is a warm memorial to the strong women in his life. One was his grandmother, who instilled in him a love of learning. The other was his mother, who came back into Scott-Heron’s life after his grandmother’s death. Both are electric presences in these pages.

In department stores in the 1950s, his grandmother refused to give up her place in line to whites. His mother fought for her son when he got into trouble for playing boogie-woogie music on a school Steinway, and when he was accidentally relegated to vocational classes. Administrators learned to fear and respect her. One said to the author: “Heron, your mother is a very impressive lady.”

Scott-Heron’s account of his school years evokes the entire arc of the African-American educational experience during the past century. He attended segregated schools in Tennessee before, bravely, in 1962, becoming one of the first blacks to desegregate a junior high school. Later, while living in the projects in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, he began attending, while in 10th grade, the prestigious Fieldston School in the Bronx on a full scholarship.

It was not an overwhelmingly positive experience. “I can never accuse the people of Fieldston, neither the students nor the faculty, of being racist,” he writes. “I can accuse the students of knowing each other for years and preferring to hang out with each other instead of some guy who just got there. I can accuse the teachers of having taught my classmates for 10 years and me for 10 minutes.”

This book is finally a testament to his unfettered drive as an artist. He left the historically black Lincoln College in Pennsylvania in 1968, after his freshman year, to write his first novel. That novel, a murder mystery called “The Vulture,” and a book of poems, “Small Talk at 125th and Lenox,” were quickly published. He began to record his songs soon after and his first album, also titled “Small Talk at 125th and Lenox,” was released in 1970.

In 1971 he drove down to Johns Hopkins University — he describes himself at the time as “about 6-foot-2 plus three inches of Afro” — and talked his way into the creative writing program. He got a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins in 1972 and taught writing until his musical career took off.

Scott-Heron’s prose in “The Last Holiday” is jumpy and alert. Describing his childhood, he’s often as funny and alienated as a J. D. Salinger creation. “At morning Mass,” he writes, “it was standing, sitting, kneeling, wheeling, dealing, silent, on prompts from occasional mumbling from the altar. Phooey!”

His put-downs are beauties. About John Knowles’s novel “A Separate Peace,” read when he was in high school: “White noise about white people.” About the terrible acoustics at Madison Square Garden, he says, “When you played there you sounded like the Knicks.”

When he is touring in Scotland and appears on a TV show to discuss his father, who’d been a soccer star there, the three elements of the show constitute “a Scottish orgasm: there would be talk about soccer, nostalgia about soccer and living evidence that they had never allowed their racism to interfere with soccer.”

Occasionally the author breaks into verse, or stretches of consonance or alliteration. His grandmother, for example, “scrapped, scrimped, scrambled, scrunched, scrubbed, scratched, scuffled, slaved and saved until somehow all four of her children had graduated from college with honors.”

This book ends with scenes from the road, when Scott-Heron and his band toured with Stevie Wonder in 1980 after Bob Marley, whose band was supposed to be Mr. Wonder’s opening act, fell ill with cancer. Scott-Heron’s account of the tour is joyous, and his respect for Mr. Wonder — who at the time was campaigning for a national holiday in honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — is palpable.

This book has some large gaps. There is little about his half-brother, his marriages or his three children. The book ends before his life began to go off the rails in the 2000s, when drug use (detailed in a 2010 New Yorker profile) and a sentence at Rikers Island for parole violation took a toll on him.

The book was pulled together by Scott-Heron’s editors from bits he wrote over many years, from the 1990s to 2010. “The manuscript he left had been sent to me in a very piecemeal fashion over a number of years and written on various archaic typewriters and computers,” his British publisher, Jamie Byng, noted in this book’s English edition. The result is not seamless, but neither is it an impressionistic jumble.

Much of this book’s beauty derives from its bedrock humility. Scott-Heron is fully aware of what he calls his “flawed makeup as a person,” his somewhat stunted emotional life and an inability to get close to people. It’s a book as much about those he admires as it is about himself.

About his own music, he could not be more simple or elegant. “I was trying to get people who listened to me,” he writes, “to realize that they were not alone.”

politicalprof:

Calling Newt Gingrich:

Who uses food stamps and other welfare programs. And no, Newt, it turns out they’re not all African American. 

From Charles Blow.

History Time!

Even though today Americans incorrectly associate welfare dependency with Black people, Black people were excluded from the welfare system for most of its history. 

Welfare was meant for immigrant women. Proponents of the welfare system thought that urban immigrants threatened “the social order.” Welfare was seen as not only charity but also as a way of “supervising and disciplining recipients.” They felt that the cure for single mothers’ poverty was for these foreigners to “conform to American family standards.”

Black single mothers were not included in this effort. Welfare was intended for White mothers only. Administrators either set-up regulations that disqualified Blacks (such as eligibility standards that excluded domestic servants) or didn’t enact programs in areas that had large Black populations. 

“As a result, in 1931 the first national survey of mothers’ pensions broken down by race found that only three percent of recipients were Black.”

In addition to this, other programs, such as those enacted in the New Deal, also excluded Blacks. When Blacks were able to gain access to some benefits, they were given less than Whites on the grounds that “Blacks needed less than Whites to live off of.” 

Blacks only began to gain access to assistant programs through the Civil Rights era. As a result of lots of hard work by grassroots organizations, welfare benefits were secured for all. 

However, this became a double edged sword kinda victory for Black America. 

“As AFDC became increasingly associated with Black mothers already stereotyped as lazy, irresponsible, and overly fertile, it became increasingly burdened with behavior modification, work requirements, and reduced effective benefit levels. Social Security, on the other hand, effectively transferred income from Blacks to whites because Blacks have a lower life expectancy and pay a disproportionate share of taxes on earnings. Meanwhile, a white backlash had decimated the War on Poverty programs within a decade.”

(via “Welfare and the Problem of Black Citizenship” by Dorothy E. Roberts)

January 7, 2012

IT ONLY TAKES ONE GIRL

TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE

It only takes one girl to make a difference.
http://www.itonlytakesagirl.org
http://itonlytakesagirl.blogspot.com
Soundtrack: "Optimist" by Zoe Keating

crookedindifference:

It only takes one girl to make a difference

#PLEASE watch this #its critically important

George Lucas:

Hollywood Didn't Want

To Fund My Film

Because Of Its Black Cast

 

—By Adam Serwer

| Tue Jan. 10, 2012

James Santelli/Neon Tommy/Flickr

 

After Jar-Jar Binks, it's hard to not to give George Lucas' new film Red Tails the side-eye. The movie is World War II-era action flick based on the Tuskegee Airmen, the heroic and decorated pilots who were first black servicemembers to fly combat missions at a time when black Americans were not recognized as full citizens on the United States, despite their willingness to fight and die in its defense.

In an interview with the Daily Show's Jon Stewart on Monday night, Lucas was frank about the trouble he had getting the film made—in part, he said, because the studios weren't willing to finance a film without a white protagonist as an anchor.  

"This has been held up for release since 1942 since it was shot, I've been trying to get released ever since," Lucas joked—although he did say that the film took about 23 years to develop. "It's because it's an all-black movie. There's no major white roles in it at all...I showed it to all of them and they said nooooo. We don't know how to market a move like this." Lucas goes on to explain that major studios don't believe films with majority black casts do well in foreign markets. Lucas was unbowed, telling Stewart that "we do want to do a prequel and a sequel," which I take as a measure of how excited and proud about Red Tails Lucas actually is. Bonus exuberance: "This is the closest you'll ever get to Episode Seven." Here's the video:

Lucas' explanation of how difficult it is for films with mostly-black casts (let alone black directors) was one of my major frustrations watching Pariah, Driector Dee Rees' excellent coming-of-age film about a black lesbian teenager in Brooklyn. It wasn't just that the movie was good, it was that lingering social attitudes about race make such films far rarer than they should be, in part because of the way they skew economic incentives for major studios. Lucas gets a little big for his britches when he disses the 1989 Civil War epic Glory by describing it as a film where "you have a lot of white officers running these guys into cannon fodder," implying that in comparison to the Massachusetts 54th Regiment the Tuskegee Airmen were "real heroes."

The derision here is unnecessary and unwarranted; the men of the 54th were certainly heroes, and though it is hard to imagine, were fighting to preserve a nation that thought even less of them than it did of the Tuskegee Airmen. Also there's maybe a .0001 percent chance that Red Tails is actually a better movie, though Lucas' point about Hollywood's aversion to making films that don't center around white protagonists is well taken. The issue here is as political as it is economic—the white protagonists' role in mostly black films is generally to act as a redemptive vehicle for the white audience, allowing them to believe that in another place, at another time, they would have been just as righteous. Whether we're talking about the men of the 54th or Capt. Robert Gould Shaw, we are speaking of a kind of courage that is present in vanishingly few people. It is however, a conceit that studios seem to view as necessary to fill seats. 

After watching Lucas' interview with Stewart, I'm more likely to see the movie than before. It's hard to forget the galactic coonery of Jar-Jar Binks. On the other hand, one of the screenwriters for Red Tails is Aaron McGruder, the writer behind the newspaper comic strip turned TV show The Boondocks. When the Star Wars prequels were first released, McGruder justifiably blasted Lucas over Jar-Jar from the perspective of a Star Wars fan. Lucas then hired him to write a movie. It's not quite enough to get me to forgive him for ruining the original Star Wars trilogy, but it's enough to get me to want to see Red Tails. 

Hidden in the Open:

A Photographic Essay

of 140-Years of

Black Male Couples

 

by Jorge Rivas, Tuesday, January 10 2012

Tags: infographic

 

Historian Trent Kelly has collected 146 rare vintage photographs of black male couples from the past 150 years.

Although the large majority of the pictures depict gay couples, the collection also includes images of families and friends but they all have one thing in common: they capture images of love.

Below is a snippet of why Kelly started the collection along with a few photos from his archive.

Historically, the Afro American gay male and couple has largely been defined by everyone but themselves. Afro American gay men are ignored into nonexistence in parts of black culture and are basically second class citizens in gay culture. The black church which has historically played a fundamental role in protesting against civil injustices toward its parishioners has been want to deny its gay members their right to live a life free and open without prejudice. Despite public projections of a “rainbow” community living together in harmonious co-habitation, openly active and passive prejudices exist in the larger gay community against gay Afro Americans.

 

 

1920s

 

1990s

 

 

Lastly, if you skip to the 4:30 minute mark you can see an interview with the historian who’s archived this collection of images.

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Video:

South African Shangaan

Gets A BOOST

January 6, 2012 Posted by: Thiat Makinwa

Located on the outskirts of Johannesburg, the South Western Township AKA Soweto is known to outsiders as the location of the Soweto Uprising of the 70s. Nowadays however, Soweto’s musical scene is beginning to surpass the area’s previous political reputation through the birth of musical styles such as Kwaito in the 90s, and more recently, Shangaan electro.

Cell phone repair shop owner turned musician and record label guru, Richard “Nozinja” Mthethwa, pioneered Shangaan electro in 2005 by re-working and speeding up the tempo of traditional Shangaan music. Unlike the original sound of Shangaan that ran at around 110 BPM, with the help of synthesizers, MIDI keyboards and marimba rhythms, Shangaan electro beats hit the 180 BPM mark and create an infectious new wave sound that’s intensely quick, but surprisingly easy on the ears. These hyperactive pulsating rhythms are paired with some hip action and pantsula-inspired moves called the Xibelani dance (check the videos above and below). We can’t wait to hear more from Nozinja’s label, Honest Jon’s Records.

 

Bachata:

The soulful music,

the slow dance

Carly Mallenbaum looks at the growth in popularity of bachata in this article for USA TODAY.

Bachata is heavily rooted in percussion, bass, guitar and a maraca-like instrument called the güira. The music “has taken off to an unbelievable degree,” says Tufts University professor Deborah Pacini Hernandez, author of Bachata: A Social History of a Dominican Popular Music.

“In 1986, nobody had ever heard of (bachata) outside of the Dominican Republic,” she says. Now, mainstream musician Usher is singing and dancing in the Latin style.

Initially, bachata was “the music of maids and taxi drivers,” says Hernandez, but singers such as Juan Luis Guerra and Antony Santos made the rural migrant music respectable, cleaner and more appealing to women.

In the 1990s, Romeo Santos’ group, Aventura, brought the music to New York and made it hip, young, bicultural and bilingual, but still authentic. Where the classic bachata is fast and includes funny double entendres, the newer version sounds more soulful and R&B-flavored.

In the dance world, bachata has taken off. Professional bachatero Lee “El Gringuito” says attendance at his D.C-based Bachata Congress has gone from hundreds in 2009 to 5,000 last August. The dance has been modernized and fused with other styles to form variations such as the bachatango and bachazouk.

Dancing bachata is much different from the grinding dances of reggaeton or hip-hop. It’s an intimate, slow chest-to-chest dance. Though Romeo Santos says he’s not the best bachata dancer (“Dancing is not my thing”), Usher can bachata like a pro.

“You can’t do a bachata and not know how to dance it,” says Usher.

For the original report go to http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/story/2012-01-12/bachata/52400522/1

Bachata Rosa painting from http://rainader.blogspot.com/2009/07/bachata-rosa.html

Ruminate is thrilled to announce our second annual Ruminate Nonfiction Prize. We invite you to enter your work. The finalist judge is the award-winning author and editor, Leslie Leyland Fields.

The 2011 Nonfiction Prize winning story Flexing, Texting, Flying by Josh MacIvor-Andersen, selected by judge Al Haley, appears in Ruminate’s Issue 20: Feasting.

Guidelines:

• The submission deadline for the prize is midnight February 1st, 2012.
• The entry fee is $15 (includes a free copy of the Summer 2012 Issue, which will include the winning piece).
• You may submit one nonfiction piece per entry and it must be 7000 words or less. There is no limit on the number of entries per person.
• $1000 and publication in the Spring 2012 Issue will be awarded to the winner. The runner-up will receive publication in the Spring 2012 Issue.
• A blind reading of all entries will be conducted by a panel of RUMINATE readers, who will select 8 nonfiction finalists.
• Close friends and students (current & former) of the judge, are not eligible to compete, nor are close friends of the RUMINATE staff.
• All submissions must be submitted via our online submission form manager. We will not accept mail or email submissions. We do not accept previously published entries.
• All submissions must be previously unpublished.
• You may enter simultaneously submitted work.
• You will pay the entry fee when you click below.
• Winners will be announced in the Summer Issue, June 2012.
• We will be notifying all entrants of submission status in early April, 2012.
• Please remove your name, bio, and any contact info from the file that you submit.

SUBMIT TO RUMINATE

 

Please Note: Ruminate adheres to the following Contest Code of Ethics, as adopted by the Council of Literary Presses and Magazines, of which Ruminate is a proud member: “CLMP’s community of independent literary publishers believes that ethical contests serve our shared goal: to connect writers and readers by publishing exceptional writing. We believe that intent to act ethically, clarity of guidelines, and transparency of process form the foundation of an ethical contest. To that end, we agree to 1) conduct our contests as ethically as possible and to address any unethical behavior on the part of our readers, judges, or editors; 2) to provide clear and specific contest guidelines — defining conflict of interest for all parties involved; and 3) to make the mechanics of our selection process available to the public. This Code recognizes that different contest models produce different results, but that each model can be run ethically. We have adopted this Code to reinforce our integrity and dedication as a publishing community and to ensure that our contests contribute to a vibrant literary heritage.”

Ruminate Magazine sponsors four annual writing contests: our art contest, poetry contest, short story contest, and nonfiction contest. We are one of the only Christian-minded literary magazines to sponsor short story contests, poetry contests, and nonfiction contests, and art contests. And while our contests–just like our magazine–are not defined as Christian poetry contests or Christian fiction contests or Christian essay contests, we do strive to provide a forum for the conversation between art and faith to exist and continue. Past winners from the Ruminate Magazine writing contests have been recognized by Poets & Writers Magazine and have received notable mention awards in The Best American Short Stories anthology and The Best American Essays anthology. Past finalist judges of our contests include Bret Lott, David James Duncan, Luci Shaw, Vito Aiuto, Greg Wolfe, Al Haley, Stephanie G’Schwind, and Leif Enger. It is our hope that our writing contests provide a significant venue for our talented contributors to receive the support and recognition they deserve.