The 2013 Fence Modern Poets Series is open to poets of any gender and at any stage in their publishing career.
The prize is $1,000 and publication by Fence Books in the fall of 2013.
Manuscripts are submitted in the month of February each year.
Upload your anonymous, full-length manuscript (~80 pages) to our online system. Do not include publication credits.
2012 Fiction Awards Competition
PRIZES: First prize: $1,000 and publication in The Ledge Magazine. Second prize: $250 and publication in The Ledge Magazine. Third prize: $100 and publication in The Ledge Magazine.
ENTRY FEE: $12 for the first story; $6 for each additional story. $20 subscription (two issues) to The Ledge gains free entry for the first story.
ALL STORIES must be previously unpublished and not exceed 7,500 words. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable but we must be notified if your story is accepted elsewhere for publication.
PLEASE include your name, mailing address and email address on each story. Please also enclose a SASE for the competition results or manuscript return.
POSTMARK DEADLINE: February 28, 2012.
SEND ENTRIES TO:
The Ledge 2012 Fiction Awards Competition
40 Maple Avenue
Bellport, NY 11713
MOVIE OF THE DAY:
Moolaadé(Ousmane Sembene - 2004)A film by legendary Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene that addresses the subject of female genital cutting.
Sodad
January 4, 2012 | by Janine de Novais
On December 17, Cesária Évora died of respiratory complications following a stroke and heart surgery. Thousands of mourners not only sang but also applauded loudly during the funeral procession. She had said, when announcing her retirement in September, “I’m sorry, but now I have to rest.”
Before Cesária Évora, being Cape Verdean meant being from an invisible country. When I was growing up in Europe in the early eighties, the islands I called home did not appear on the maps we studied in school. Little obnoxious Belgian classmates would accuse me of inventing the place. My other friends had it easy. If someone asked where they were from, they could answer, “I am Belgian,” “I am Dutch,” “I am Moroccan.” They could respond, whereas I always found myself giving long-winded answers that included the phrases five hundred kilometers, west coast, and Senegal; and required cutting the air in the shape of Africa and picking a spot somewhere in the middle of an imagined ocean. There—that’s where I’m from. I might as well have said, Nowhere.
I distinctly remember how this changed when Cesária Évora became a worldwide sensation. It was sudden and startling; I could now tell anybody I was Cape Verdean and expect them to reply with her name, as if it were a greeting: You’re Cape Verdean? Oh, Cesária Évora! She encompassed all I wanted to say about home: her voice was the easy pace, the maritime air, the raspy beauty, and the full sound of the port city of Mindelo, her hometown and mine.
In the summer of 2005, when I was home in Mindelo for the summer, my grandmother took me along to visit Cesária.
To me, it was very much like visiting a living national monument. I was nervous that day. When we arrived at the large house, there was a crew of Portuguese journalists seated in her immaculate living room, seemingly awaiting her. My grandmother walked us past them, through a small inner courtyard, and straight to the kitchen, where Cize, as she was known at home, was busy cooking. She told us she had no intention of joining her guests but pointed to the stove and joked that they should be glad she would feed them. Both women laughed out loud as we sat. Cesária served us cold beer and we snacked on pastel—fish fritters. She was older and shorter than I expected from seeing her on screens or on stage in New York City. She wore a simple house dress, along with what seemed like a significant portion of her gold jewelry collection. She had on one of those multipocket aprons that Cape Verdean women often use, the central nerve system of domestic life: out of one pocket comes the change for the kid to go buy fresh bread, out of another the keys for the guy picking up the relative from the airport. She kept everything close at hand as the apron jingled with the running of her home, and occasionally one hand went up to wipe the sweat off her face. Like my grandmother, she wore only eye makeup. The two women gossiped about their love lives for a while before talking about family. Cesária asked my grandmother about her children, and I was surprised that she remembered all their names and countries of residence. She asked who had had children since last they had spoken, and I had. “With an American?” she asked in disbelief. “Spanish—a Dominican,” I added quickly. I wanted her to understand I had veered off, but not too far off.
For a “barefoot diva,” as she was known for performing barefoot, Cesária was shy onstage, sometimes withholding. She would often stare in a way that made the audience feel they did not exist. Then she would make jokes in creole, and chuckle with her musicians and the Cape Verdeans in the audience—inside jokes. Her stage presence was small and fierce, hard to read. She seemed to be minding her own business up there, only worried about singing the songs: we wanted to stay back home but we were broke and had to immigrate; we blame the drought; we blame the ocean; we act a fool with our lovers; politicians act a fool with us; we survive; before we die we will go back.
She always made time to visit with the Cape Verdeans who came backstage, whether in New York or New Zealand, in Boston or Barcelona. She sat so people could hug her, take pictures with her, and afterward go back to the places they lived, and stand up a little straighter, a little prouder. In the early days, in between songs, she would smoke and drink, sitting on a small table onstage, just like she did in her kitchen back home in Mindelo. We all grew up around tables like that, cigarettes here, liquor bottle there, flanked by chatter and a couple guitars. She understood what we needed. Cape Verdeans are a small people, a million split evenly between the islands and the diaspora. We have never wanted or expected recognition; we have always taken to the ocean and gone to meet the world ourselves. We run fickle and deep like that ocean. We’re a perpetual imprecision of identities and desires and destinies, busy creolizing everything. But when she sang, we settled. Wherever Cesária Évora stood, she was all that we are, and we felt we were real.
Janine de Novais, a Cape Verdean New Yorker, currently resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her son, Jalen, where she is pursuing a doctorate at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education.
Harder for Americans
to Rise From Lower Rungs
By JASON DePARLE
Published: January 4, 2012
WASHINGTON — Benjamin Franklin did it. Henry Ford did it. And American life is built on the faith that others can do it, too: rise from humble origins to economic heights. “Movin’ on up,” George Jefferson-style, is not only a sitcom song but a civil religion.
But many researchers have reached a conclusion that turns conventional wisdom on its head: Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe. The mobility gap has been widely discussed in academic circles, but a sour season of mass unemployment and street protests has moved the discussion toward center stage.
Former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a Republican candidate for president, warned this fall that movement “up into the middle income is actually greater, the mobility in Europe, than it is in America.” National Review, a conservative thought leader, wrote that “most Western European and English-speaking nations have higher rates of mobility.” Even Representative Paul D. Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican who argues that overall mobility remains high, recently wrote that “mobility from the very bottom up” is “where the United States lags behind.”
Liberal commentators have long emphasized class, but the attention on the right is largely new.
“It’s becoming conventional wisdom that the U.S. does not have as much mobility as most other advanced countries,” said Isabel V. Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution. “I don’t think you’ll find too many people who will argue with that.”
One reason for the mobility gap may be the depth of American poverty, which leaves poor children starting especially far behind. Another may be the unusually large premiums that American employers pay for college degrees. Since children generally follow their parents’ educational trajectory, that premium increases the importance of family background and stymies people with less schooling.
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At least five large studies in recent years have found the United States to be less mobile than comparable nations. A project led by Markus Jantti, an economist at a Swedish university, found that 42 percent of American men raised in the bottom fifth of incomes stay there as adults. That shows a level of persistent disadvantage much higher than in Denmark (25 percent) and Britain (30 percent) — a country famous for its class constraints.
Meanwhile, just 8 percent of American men at the bottom rose to the top fifth. That compares with 12 percent of the British and 14 percent of the Danes.
Despite frequent references to the United States as a classless society, about 62 percent of Americans (male and female) raised in the top fifth of incomes stay in the top two-fifths, according to research by the Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts. Similarly, 65 percent born in the bottom fifth stay in the bottom two-fifths.
By emphasizing the influence of family background, the studies not only challenge American identity but speak to the debate about inequality. While liberals often complain that the United States has unusually large income gaps, many conservatives have argued that the system is fair because mobility is especially high, too: everyone can climb the ladder. Now the evidence suggests that America is not only less equal, but also less mobile.
John Bridgeland, a former aide to President George W. Bush who helped startOpportunity Nation, an effort to seek policy solutions, said he was “shocked” by the international comparisons. “Republicans will not feel compelled to talk about income inequality,” Mr. Bridgeland said. “But they will feel a need to talk about a lack of mobility — a lack of access to the American Dream.”
While Europe differs from the United States in culture and demographics, a more telling comparison may be with Canada, a neighbor with significant ethnic diversity. Miles Corak, an economist at the University of Ottawa, found that just 16 percent of Canadian men raised in the bottom tenth of incomes stayed there as adults, compared with 22 percent of Americans. Similarly, 26 percent of American men raised at the top tenth stayed there, but just 18 percent of Canadians.
“Family background plays more of a role in the U.S. than in most comparable countries,” Professor Corak said in an interview.
Skeptics caution that the studies measure “relative mobility” — how likely children are to move from their parents’ place in the income distribution. That is different from asking whether they have more money. Most Americans have higher incomes than their parents because the country has grown richer.
Some conservatives say this measure, called absolute mobility, is a better gauge of opportunity. A Pew study found that 81 percent of Americans have higher incomes than their parents (after accounting for family size). There is no comparable data on other countries.
Since they require two generations of data, the studies also omit immigrants, whose upward movement has long been considered an American strength. “If America is so poor in economic mobility, maybe someone should tell all these people who still want to come to the U.S.,” said Stuart M. Butler, an analyst at the Heritage Foundation.
The income compression in rival countries may also make them seem more mobile. Reihan Salam, a writer for The Daily and National Review Online, has calculated that a Danish family can move from the 10th percentile to the 90th percentile with $45,000 of additional earnings, while an American family would need an additional $93,000.
Even by measures of relative mobility, Middle America remains fluid. About 36 percent of Americans raised in the middle fifth move up as adults, while 23 percent stay on the same rung and 41 percent move down, according to Pew research. The “stickiness” appears at the top and bottom, as affluent families transmit their advantages and poor families stay trapped.
While Americans have boasted of casting off class since Poor Richard’s Almanac, until recently there has been little data.
Pioneering work in the early 1980s by Gary S. Becker, a Nobel laureate in economics, found only a mild relationship between fathers’ earnings and those of their sons. But when better data became available a decade later, another prominent economist, Gary Solon, found the bond twice as strong. Most researchers now estimate the “elasticity” of father-son earnings at 0.5, which means if one man earns $100,000 more than another, his sons would earn $50,000 more on average than the sons of the poorer man.
In 2006 Professor Corak reviewed more than 50 studies of nine countries. He ranked Canada, Norway, Finland and Denmark as the most mobile, with the United States and Britain roughly tied at the other extreme. Sweden, Germany, and France were scattered across the middle.
The causes of America’s mobility problem are a topic of dispute — starting with the debates over poverty. The United States maintains a thinner safety net than other rich countries, leaving more children vulnerable to debilitating hardships.
Poor Americans are also more likely than foreign peers to grow up with single mothers. That places them at an elevated risk of experiencing poverty and related problems, a point frequently made by Mr. Santorum, who surged into contention in the Iowa caucuses. The United States also has uniquely high incarceration rates, and a longer history of racial stratification than its peers.
“The bottom fifth in the U.S. looks very different from the bottom fifth in other countries,” said Scott Winship, a researcher at the Brookings Institution, who wrote the article for National Review. “Poor Americans have to work their way up from a lower floor.”
A second distinguishing American trait is the pay tilt toward educated workers. While in theory that could help poor children rise — good learners can become high earners — more often it favors the children of the educated and affluent, who have access to better schools and arrive in them more prepared to learn.
“Upper-income families can invest more in their children’s education and they may have a better understanding of what it takes to get a good education,” said Eric Wanner, president of the Russell Sage Foundation, which gives grants to social scientists.
The United States is also less unionized than many of its peers, which may lower wages among the least skilled, and has public health problems, like obesity and diabetes, which can limit education and employment.
Perhaps another brake on American mobility is the sheer magnitude of the gaps between rich and the rest — the theme of the Occupy Wall Street protests, which emphasize the power of the privileged to protect their interests. Countries with less equality generally have less mobility.
Mr. Salam recently wrote that relative mobility “is overrated as a social policy goal” compared with raising incomes across the board. Parents naturally try to help their children, and a completely mobile society would mean complete insecurity: anyone could tumble any time.
But he finds the stagnation at the bottom alarming and warns that it will worsen. Most of the studies end with people born before 1970, while wage gaps, single motherhood and incarceration increased later. Until more recent data arrives, he said, “we don’t know the half of it."
The mystery of Julien Hudson
Art Review
Portrait of a Man, called a Self-Portrait and Creole Boy With a Moth are included… (LOUISIANA STATE MUSEUM (LEFT); Fodera Fine Art Conservation Ltd.)
WORCESTER - In 1911, Rudolph Lucien Desdunes, the son of free people of color, wrote a history of colored people who had made important contributions to his New Orleans community. It was called “Nos hommes et notre histoire (Our People and Our History),’’ and it drew not only on written records but on collective memory.
In the book, Desdunes described a painter called “Alexandre Pickhil’’ in a way that has piqued the interests and excitement of art historians ever since. Read what he said, and you will see why:
“We had our Titian in Louisiana in the person of Alexandre Pickhil. We know that Pickhil produced magnificent pictures, but he has left us nothing as a legacy, perhaps because he became disillusioned. He is said to have executed a full-length portrait of an eminent ecclesiastic, but he destroyed this masterpiece because of vicious criticism upon it. Thus, although Pickhil may have been the best painter of his era, he preferred to die in misery and anonymity rather than display his talent to the detriment of his self-respect. . . . It is said that disillusionment cast a cloud of despair over his whole life.’’
A Titian in Louisiana? One who - presumably because of his race - was sidelined, vilified, and driven to despair? In the history of race relations in this country, it’s explosive stuff.
Yet after Desdunes’s book was published, subsequent commentators were quick to realize that the artist he was referring to was not, in fact, Alexandre Pickhil (no such person existed) but Julien Hudson, a free artist of color whose nickname was “Pickil.’’
Hudson’s story - what little was known of it - was picked up, and by the 1930s, historians had started assigning him a definite racial identity. In Ben Earl Looney’s “Historical Sketch of Art in Louisiana’’ (1935) he was “a negro.’’
Even more intriguingly, a portrait of a man that was undoubtedly by Hudson’s hand was described in a newspaper review in 1938 as a self-portrait. The reviewer, Ethel Hutson, claimed that the subject, whose skin is light and eyes are blue, “shows pronounced Jewish as well as Negroid characters.’’
There is nothing in the historical record to substantiate Hutson’s claims, as William Keyse Rudolph points out in an essay in the catalog that accompanies a deeply fascinating exhibition at the Worcester Art Museum, “In Search of Julien Hudson, Free Artist of Color in Pre-Civil War New Orleans.’’
But her claim stuck. And in subsequent decades, as first the Harlem Renaissance and then the civil rights movement stimulated a gush of attempts at documenting the cultural contributions of African-Americans, the portrait - now deemed a self-portrait - appeared in a slew of authoritative studies of African-American history. Among these were books such as James A. Porter’s “Modern Negro Art’’ (1943) and Arna Bontemp’s “Story of the Negro’’ (1948), and such groundbreaking exhibitions as “American Self-Portraits, 1670-1973’’ (1974), “Two Centuries of Black American Art’’ (1976), and “Selections of Nineteenth-Century Afro-American Art’’ (1976).
Those three shows were at, respectively, the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. By the time of the Met show, the Hudson portrait had entered the historical record not just as a self-portrait but as “the earliest known portrait of an Afro-American artist’’ by “the earliest documented professional Afro-American painter in the South.’’A very important picture, in other words.
The Worcester Art Museum’s show includes this painting, although it wisely acknowledges the paucity of evidence for its status as a self-portrait by labeling it “Portrait of a Man, called a Self-Portrait.’’ It also includes Hudson’s five other extant works, as well as two that have been tentatively attributed to him, though with scant evidence to confirm it.
All in all, the show and its terrific catalog do a neat job of puncturing the mythology that has built up around Hudson and the peculiarly compelling portrait he painted. But it replaces it with a much juicier, more substantial picture of the artist in his context.
The exhibition, which has come to Worcester after stints at The Historic New Orleans Collection in New Orleans and the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, S.C., is well worth a visit. It has three rooms. The first is devoted primarily to Hudson’s teachers; the second to Hudson himself, and the third to his competitors and peers, some of them artists of color.
All this gives us a sense not only of Hudson - who remains frustratingly elusive - but of New Orleans between 1810 and 1840, as its population exploded and it emerged as the crucial transportation hub of the south.
Hudson, we know, was the son of Desirée Marcos, a property-owning free woman of color, and John Thomas Hudson, an English merchant, ironmonger, and ship chandler. Marcos seems to have been a formidable woman. She had 13 children by five different men. She was, writes Patricia Brady in another catalog essay, “fiercely protective of her children, financially savvy, and willing to go to court to protect her interests.’’
Hudson was Marcos’s firstborn. After a brief spell as a tailor’s apprentice in the mid-1820s, he decided to pursue a career in painting. The decision sounds like no big deal, until you register that he was the first native-born portraitist to practice in New Orleans, and only the second documented painter of African-American descent in the United States.
His first teacher in New Orleans was an itinerant Roman called Antonio Meucci. Meucci painted miniature portraits, and kept busy by retouching damaged works, painting opera scenery, and teaching. Three of his miniatures are included here, and they are nothing if not charming.In 1831, Hudson traveled to Paris. After studying back in New Orleans with the German-born François Fleischbein, he went to Paris again in 1837, this time to study with the well-known artist Alexandre-Denis Abel de Pujol.
When he came back, New Orleans was suffering from an economic slump, and Hudson presumably struggled to find patrons. Only three portraits from this period are known.
He died in 1844, at the age of 33. Again, as with so many aspects of his life, we don’t know how he died, although the possibility he committed suicide is floated in the catalog.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the show is the insight it gives into the status of free people of color in New Orleans during these pre-Civil War years. By 1830, free people of color made up a quarter of the city’s population, and more than a third of its free population.
They constituted an intermediate caste between the enslaved population and the free whites. Their position was precarious, but they had many advantages - both legal and economic - and great mobility (as evidenced by Hudson’s two trips to Paris).
Nonetheless, restrictions were placed on where they could live. They were expected to show deference to former masters, and free women of color had to wear a tignon, or head scarf, to indicate their status.
After the Civil War, in many ways their position worsened. From then on blacks were blacks and whites were whites, and the intermediate category - free people of color - ceased to exist.
The show’s third room contains some marvelous works, including a series of lithograph portraits by Jules Lion, an artist of mixed Afro-European ancestry.
As for Hudson’s own work, it’s safe to say that he was no Titian. The “Portrait of a Man, called a Self-Portrait’’ was his most accomplished effort. His other portraits, though not without interest (his “Portrait of a Black Man’’ is awkward but certainly memorable), reveal a very limited artist. With further time and training, he may have developed. He was, after all, only young.
After the first single “Ah Yeah” from his upcoming new “Black Radio“album, Robert Glasper now released two new tracks”Move Love” featuring the KING and “Afro Blue” featuring Erykah Badu. Pre-order the album via iTunes
Support: Robert Glasper // The King
Lyric Jones
ft. Esperanza Spalding
& DJ Raydar Ellis
Emcee, drummer, and up-and-coming force in the hip-hop realm Lyric Jones has teamed up with fellow Berklee alum musical wonders Esperanza Spalding and DJ Raydar Ellis in releasing “Loss On Repeat,” the third leak off of her upcoming album due out this February entitled Jones St. With Jones spitting verses and Esperanza flowing through the hooks, Ellis had the envious job of tying it all together. The three artists seem to have created a musically conscious track with the potential for widespread appeal. Worth a listen? No doubt.
The 2012-13 Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, offering $1500 and publication with Starcherone Books, begins accepting entries October 1, 2011
Contest is open to story collections, novels, or indeterminate prose works up to 400 pages. Manuscripts will be blind-judged; the author's name should appear on the first of two title pages and nowhere else in the manuscript. Do not include an Acknowledgment page in your manuscript. There is an administrative fee of $35. Please do not send cash. The postmark deadline is February 17, 2012. The winner will be announced in August 2012. All finalists will be considered for publication with Starcherone Books. See our ad in the January-February 2012 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
ENTRY DIRECTIONS
Snail Mail
There will be a reading fee of $35. Please do not send cash. The contest is blind-judged, so the author's name and contact information should appear on title page and nowhere else in manuscript. (Please also remove mentions of previous excerpt publications from manuscripts; do not include acknowledgment pages.) A second title page with only the manuscript title should also be included. A separate document should provide a short author bio/publication history. Please mail to:
STARCHERONE FICTION PRIZE, Starcherone Books, P.O. Box 303, Buffalo, NY 14201-0303
Electronic
Send your reading fee of $35 to the above snail mail address. Then send your manuscript as an email attachment to publisher@starcherone.com. Please send the manuscript either as an Adobe pdf file or an MS Word file. In your email, give your name and contact information, as well as the title of your manuscript and a short author bio/publication history. Include only the title on your manuscript, with no mention of the author's name. If you wish, include a self-addressed postcard for notification that we have received both your manuscript and fee, as well as the SASE for contest results. Any questions may also be referred to publisher@starcherone.com.
