PUB: Emergency Press

THE EMERGENCY PRESS INTERNATIONAL BOOK CONTEST

We are now accepting submissions of book-length manuscripts for our 2011 contest. We are especially interested in books that are cross-genre or multimedia. To be considered, manuscripts should be written in English, but may be submitted by writers from any nation or tribe. The winner will receive a prize of $1,000 and publication of their book by Emergency Press. Contestants may submit multiple manuscripts. A $20 entry fee will be charged per manuscript.

The contest will be judged by Ewa Chrusciel, author of Strata, and winner of the 2009 contest.

The deadline for the 2011 contest is July 1, 2011. Please send your manuscript by email as an attachment to: contest@emergencypress.org.

All payments must be made through PayPal, please.

 

The 2010 Emergency Press International Book Contest Award winner is Nicholaus Patnaude for First Aide Medicine. First Aide Medicine will be published in late 2011, and Mr. Patnaude will receive a prize of $1,000.

If you have any questions about the contest please send us an email at contest@emergencypress.org.

 

INTERVIEW: Teju Cole (Author of Open City)

Debut Author Snapshot: Teju Cole

January, 2011

Teju Cole

The eclectic chaos of city life has served as both muse and foil for many writers, artists, and dreamers, and photographer Teju Cole is no exception. His portfolio bursts with images captured in many of the world's great metropolises—Rome, Rio de Janeiro, Delhi, and his hometown, Lagos. Growing up in Nigeria, Cole published a novella with photographs, Every Day Is for the Thief, about a young Nigerian coming home after many years away. The writer now lives in Brooklyn and has turned to New York City as his source of inspiration for his introspective debut novel, Open City. A young Nigerian-German psychiatrist named Julius restlessly wanders Manhattan on foot, pondering lost love, post-9/11 America, even the bedbug infestation. Cole shares three photographs, "New York Red," "New York White," and New York Blue" that evoke the city's varied landscapes.

 


"New York Red" by Teju Cole
Goodreads: What is your favorite thing about New York City?

Teju Cole: The poet Tomas Tranströmer has a memorable line about New York being a place "where one glance can encompass eight million people's homes." That's a number so large as to be almost incomprehensible, and my favorite moments in New York are of being in a high-rise or on a plane approaching one of the city's airports early in the evening and seeing the soft and glimmering lights below: evidence of millions of lives and millions of stories playing out in real time. And I love all evocations of this, whether it be James Salter's stories or in Jay-Z's songs.

GR: Like your protagonist, do you enjoy contemplative walks, letting both your thoughts and feet wander?

TC: Yes, I love walking alone in the city. While writing Open City, I wandered around a great deal because I wanted the book to have the texture of lived experience. Once, I walked from Houston Street to Columbia University, a distance of only seven miles, but in the middle of the city, where each block has a different character, that feels like an epic trek. And such walks, when undertaken late at night with no particular plan in mind, as many of mine are, can take on the character of a hallucination: one strangely illuminated encounter following another, and another, and another for hours.

 


"New York White" by Teju Cole
One night I was out walking and I saw David Carradine, and we locked eyes. Then he sort of melted away into the night, and I went on my way. I thought about this when I heard, a couple of years later, that he'd died in strange circumstances.

GR: What led to your choice of making Julius a doctor?

TC: My aim in the book was to write about someone who is sensitive to hidden things. Professionally, as a psychiatrist, Julius is treating serious illnesses that seldom betray external physical symptoms. In his time away from work he is drawn again and again to those aspects of city life that are ignored or disregarded: immigrants, suppressed histories, ongoing persecutions of all kinds, and interrupted or incomplete mourning.

But the story turns, to a certain extent, on how this sensitivity masks Julius's refusal to address certain aspects of his own history. There's a sad irony to it.

 


"New York Blue" by Teju Cole
GR: What are you working on now?

TC: In addition to my photography, I'm working on two very different projects. One is a dissertation on Pieter Bruegel's paintings, work that was made during the Dutch revolt against Spanish rule in the 1560s. The other is a nonfiction narrative about the city of Lagos, where I spent the first 17 years of my life.

Actually, I suppose there are three projects, as I'm also taking notes for another New York novel. But it takes a long time for the material of a novel to accrete, so it'll be a while before I'm ready to write that book.

 

__________________________

 

Teju Cole:

A “Seething Intelligence”

on a Long Journey

MAY 17, 2011

Teju Cole and Open City, his marvel of a first novel, pull you into a peculiarly contemporary stream of consciousness — of a global mind in motion, coming home to see himself and us, as if for the first time. Born in Michigan of Nigerian parents, Cole was raised in Lagos to the age of 17, then got his college and graduate education (briefly in medicine, then in art history) in the States. It’s not just the quick resumé that reminds you of Rana Dasgupta — who was born and educated in England, then returned to his father’s country, India, to write stories and the novel Solo, set in the everywhere/nowhere of Bulgaria. Both writers — friends and mutual admirers, both in their mid-thirties — seem to have undertaken a project without borders. Cole tells me he likes to see himself evaluating a scene, he says, like an detective in a cop show: “What have we got here?” First, he looks; then he starts digging. History is the new geography, even at Ground Zero in Manhattan:

This was not the first erasure on the site… The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased and rewritten. There had been communities here before Columbus ever set sail, before Verrazano anchored his ships in the narrows, or the black Portugese slave trader Esteban Gomez sailed up the Hudson; human beings had lived here, built homes, and quarreled with their neighbors long before the Dutch ever saw a business opportunity in the rich furst and timber of the island and its calm bay. Generations rushed through the eye of the needle, and I, one of the still legible crowd, entered the subway. I wanted to find the line that connected me to my own part in these stories…

The narrator “Julius” at the World Trade Center site, inOpen City by Teju Cole. Random House, 2011. p. 59

Teju Cole in conversation is sprightly, almost ecstatically musical, well-read and warm. He spins, riffs, notices and links — much as he does on the page. On an effulgent May afternoon in New York we are sitting on the grass, as it happens, before the brick row houses around Henry James’s Washington Square Park. Talk about palimpsests! And Teju Cole, feeling “more alive than on other days,” is peering through the layers and disguises of the scene, picking out evidences of his “open city” transformed.

What we see is an apparently uncomplicated scene of urban leisure on a Thursday afternoon, but all of this is happening in a historical context, and in the shadow of economic uncertainty… Some of the people are here because they’re out of work. You could say to yourself: New York City is an astonishingly diverse place, but we see around us all kinds of evidence of segregation: white students from NYU, and black women of a certain age working as nannies for white babies. We are looking at the American reality under an overlay of innocence…

This city, like many others, is a space that has been pre-inhabited, that contains the stories of people who are gone, who are vanished. We look at their inscriptions and we engage with their monuments, and we walk along their paths: every time you walk down Broadway, you’re walking along an ancient cattle path that was put down by Native Americans who then had an appalling encounter with European invaders and were more or less wiped out. But we still walk down their roads. And those roads themselves, and many of those buildings, were built by slave labor in this city, by people not only whose lives have been erased from the record, but whose deaths, in a way, have been erased from the record. Only recently was the burial grounds of the slaves rediscovered. And even then, most of that burial ground is covered with office buildings now. There’s this essential mystery of life in the city: it contains others who are not us in the present time — I’m not you and you’re not me, maybe we don’t live in the same neighborhood — but it also contains others who are not us, in the sense that so much of it was made by those others.

Teju Cole with Chris Lydon in Washington Square Park, New York City, May 12, 2011.

Teju Cole is opening up, too, about the music that’s written into Open City — for example, the pattern of “doublings” (as in instrumental voices) of characters and cities, themes and phrases (like the air of a man “who had undertaken long journeys”) that recur in different rhythms and harmonies, so to speak. In particular, Gustav Mahler is another of those “vanished” who inhabit Teju Cole’s present and obsess his character Julius, a psychiatry resident about to start his clinical practice. Mahler (death centennial next year) was himself drawn to the “open city” of New York in a tormented late act of a great composing-conducting career. He was, Cole writes, “the genius of prolonged farewells,” in a long series of “final statements,” up to his unfinished Tenth Symphony.

Mahler’s music flows somewhere under Cole’s elegiac novel — “a story,” he calls it, “of mourning, for the feeling this city carried with itself after 9.11.” But what is it, I wonder, we are still bidding farewell? “It’s as if,” Cole says, “after 9.11 we entered a new phase in the life of this civilization. But I think it was also clear that it was the end of something… There’s a strong goodbye element in this novel, too.” The last chapter of the book, we’re noting, has three endings: one at Carnegie Hall, in a Simon Rattle performance of Mahler’s Ninth; another in a view of the stars over Manhattan; the last in a harbor-cruise view of the Statue of Liberty.

There are two “open cities,” it turns out, in Teju Cole’s novel. Julius travels in search of his German mother to Belgium. Brussels is the city which gave Hitler’s troops free passage in World War II and preserved its medieval design but which, by 2006, is half-paralyzed by dread of Muslim immigrants. Brussels is where Julius meets his own double, a Moroccan Islamist of “seething intelligence,” a phone-store clerk who wants to be Edward Said when he grows up. And then there is Brussels’ “double,” New York, open to the deadbeat and the driven, thriving on perpetual renewal, and “saturated with the ominous energies” of its inherited past.

But then a student delighted Teju Cole on a school visit with the thought that his invention Julius — a solitary walker and cool, catalytic conversationalist with a stunning variety of New Yorkers — is himself the Open City.

Teju Cole’s last word with us — very much in that Open City spirit — was about the work ahead: first, a non-fiction account of Lagos (another “doubling,” it seems, of Rana Dasgupta’s work in progress on New Delhi) and then another novel:

“It’s simmering very softly below the surface. I don’t know what it’ll be. I don’t know where it’ll go. But I am going to have to confront Ulysses. We can’t keep pretending it didn’t happen. We can’t keep writing 19th Century novels, you know. We can’t pretend that that amazing unexploded ordnance of a book did not happen.” On the other side of Washington Square Park we hear sounds of kids cheering. “And in the far distance,” Teju Cole closed, as if on cue, “people applaud that idea. So I take it as a sign from the gods.”

 

 

 

VIDEO: Award-Winning, Internationally-Screened Nigerian Film “Anchor Baby” > Shadow and Act

Watch Trailer For Award-Winning, Internationally-Screened Nigerian Film “Anchor Baby”

Anchor Baby is a Nigerian film that’s gained some major recognition on the festival circuit.  It’s screened, as an official selection, at some popular film festivals so far including Pan African Film Festival and the San Diego Black Film Festival.  It also garnered two nominations at the 2011 African Movie Academy Awards (AMAA).  Presently, it’s screening at the Cannes film festival marketplace.

The story follows a married, illegal immigrant couple who are expecting a child and are determined, despite being forced by US immigration to leave the country, to have the child in the US.

Written and directed by Lonzo Nzekwe, the film stars Omoni Oboli, Sam Sarpong, Terri Oliver, Colin Paradine, Mark Cassius, Michael Scratch, Cyrus Faird and Santiago Lopera.

Synopsis:

Married, illegal immigrant couple Joyce (Omoni Oboli) and Paul Unanga (Sam Sarpong) have been ordered by the U.S. immigration to leave the country. They decide that they will leave, but only after Joyce, who is five months pregnant, delivers her baby in the U.S. This will guarantee automatic U.S. citizenship for their child. Ignoring the deportation order the couple goes into hiding. Later, Paul is caught and deported by a team of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, led by agent Mark Castello (Michael Scratch). This leaves Joyce to struggle on her own to accomplish their dream.

But bureaucracy keeps getting in the way of Joyce achieving her goal and just as she is about to give up hope, she meets Susan Backley (Terri Oliver), a married freelance writer who offers to help in the form of safe, free accommodation until the baby is born. With the help of her newfound friend, Joyce sets out to make the ‘American Dream’ come true for her unborn child.

Anchor Baby highlights the struggles of many immigrants in the United States and other developed countries across the world, and features Nigerian “Nollywood” star Omoni Oboli (Figurine, Guilty Pleasures), Ghanaian-raised LA-based Sam Sarpong (Street Kings, The Dedd Brothers, Keeping Up with the Steins) and Canadian actress/songwriter Terri Oliver.

For more information and updates, follow their Facebook page HERE.

 

 

OP-ED: Securing the Rights and Protections of Africa’s Sex Workers > Reclaiming The Narrative: Making History (& Writing It Too!)

Securing the Rights

and Protections

of Africa’s Sex Workers

[Crosslinked at Future Challenges Organization's blog]

Sex work is a business that requires only one‘s bodily capital. The economics of scarcity are often a factor in making sex work a viable and lucrative option for women and men.  Because sex work is illegal in 37 African nations, sex workers are often criminalize and subjected to harassment at the hands of policemen and government officials. In addition to criminalization, the migration that often accompanies sex work makes it harder to gather viable statistics on how many sex workers there are within one nation, or even track their transnational movement. In Southern and East Africa, sex work often occurs at the borders where bureaucratic processes leave truck drivers waiting for permission to enter the country. The wait can last from hours to days. Also, the sex trade is a complementary industry to mining industry, where mine workers are sometimes live away from their spouses and families in compounds.

Challenges include mobility, criminalization, language differences, cultural norms and entrenched traditions. However, this has not stopped sex workers across Africa from organizing collectively to raise awareness and campaign for an end to violence against sex workers.The African Sex Workers Alliance  (ASWA) is working in Uganda, Mozambique, South Africa and Kenya to decriminalize sex work and expand the rights of sex workers. In Kenya, the African Sex Workers Alliance marked December 17th, 2010 as the first International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. In Abuja, Nigeria, sex workers demonstrated for their rights and protections on March 3rd, which is International Sex Worker Rights Day.

In South Africa, where prostitution has been illegal since 1957, sex workers report regular harassment by the police. The Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) is following up on all cases alleging harassment or wrongful arrest by the police. The Sisonke Sex Worker Movement, based in Johannesburg, had a large number of calls from sex workers who were arrested or assaulted by South African police following the March 3rd demonstration for the International Sex Worker Rights Day. In Johannesburg, Cape Town and Mussina, South African sex workers took to the streets and demonstrated with signs and red umbrellas. However, after the protests, some sex workers faced harassment from the police. Some reports included demands for bribes in the form of sexual favors or money in order to avoid arrest. Kyomya Macklean, South Africa‘s regional coordinator for the African Sex Worker Alliance, stated:

“People who brutalize sex workers do so with the hope that sex workers will feel too afraid to come out and report these events. Can these police officers not see that these women have feelings and that they were really scared or do they simply see sex workers as an object? When you kicked her do you not have any sense of remorse and concern for the victim or is this something that brings you enjoyment, a malicious and tic violence that comes from acting as a law unto yourself and feeling power, control and pleasure in hurting the other and reducing them to feeling helpless? But I want you to know, we will not be turned into objects and we will have the courage to be powerful and seek justice and demand we are treat with respect. You will not take taking away and undermine our capacity to experience ourselves in powerful and independent women.”

HIV/AIDS and Access to Healthcare

The HIV prevalance among sex workers in some nations in sub-Saharan Africa are up to 20 times higher than that of the general population. In Southern and East Africa, HIV prevalence in the general population is much higher than that in West Africa. However, up to a third of West African sex workers are living with HIV or AIDS. In Ghana, female sex workers, their clients and the sexual partners of those clients made up 33 percent of new reported HIV infections in 2009. This figure was 10 percent in Uganda, and 14 percent in Kenya.

The criminalization of homosexuality (it‘s a capital crime in Mauritania, Sudan and the Central African Republic) makes it difficult to find reliable statistics on HIV prevalence among male and transgender sex workers. One study in Mombasa, Kenya found that less than half of male sex workers interviewed consistently used condoms with their male clients. Condom usage among male sex workers was similarly low with female clients.

In Kenya, a condom shortage The Kenyan government stopped importing condoms produced in China because they were of poor quality. The US‘ Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief has sent 45 million to Kenya. According to Peter Cherutich, the Deputy Director of Kenya‘s National AIDS Control Programme, the government signed a long-term agreement with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFP) to supply 180 million condoms in May. Additionally, female condoms, while convenient and effective in preventing pregnancy, are cost-prohibitive.

It is clear that accessible, good-quality healthcare is needed- especially for sex workers who have contracted sexually transmitted infections, which are co-factors for contracting HIV and for sex workers who are living with HIV/AIDS. This care extends beyond services like HIV counseling, testing, and therapy. Effective healthcare for stigmatized and criminalized populations like sex workers hinge heavily on the sensitivity of the personnel in the medical care center. Staff attitudes are instrumental to making patients feel as though they can ask for much-needed services without judgment. Additionally, waiting times, language barriers and environments that are not child-friendly can be impediments to vital healthcare.

HARM REDUCTION

Sex work is very risky on several fronts. Legally, sex work and sex workers are criminalized. Socially, attitudes toward sex work tend to excuse violence and abuse levied against sex workers. Physically, there is a risk of contracting sexually transmitted infections and diseases like Hepatitis A, B, Syphilis and the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). In addition, the overlap between drug use and sex work increases the likelihood of spreading HIV through injection-drug use infection.

Harm reduction methodologies include peer education, training in condom-use negotiating skills, safety training for street-based sex workers and community-based child protection networks. Harm reduction is just what the name implies- sensitive, responsive, non-judgmental approaches to education, empowerment and equipping within marginalized or stigmatized populations- in this case, sex workers.  The emphasis on education, empowerment and equipping is significant because it recognizes sex workers are individuals capable of making choices in their best interest with the information that is available to them. Rather than positioning them as victims, harm reduction approaches tend to focus on whole individuals with particular needs.

Among Chadian sex workers, peer-to-peer education and counseling has proven to be the most cost-effective form of outreach and empowerment. It is also one of the most sustainable approaches, because as veteran sex workers counsel less-experienced sex workers, they pass on what is perhaps the most important currency- information. Furthermore, peer-to-peer learning is firmly situated within sex workers‘ networks. In Johannesburg, hotel-based sex workers have adopted a similar community development model to reduce risk and educate less-experienced sex workers.

Written by Zawadi Nyong‘o, “When I Dare To Be Powerful: On The Road To A Sexual Rights Movement in East Africa” highlights the multifaceted oral histories and experiences of five East African sex workers. The last section of the book was a list of 32 risk-management tips for sex workers, by sex workers. This is an example of a rights-based harm reduction approach to empowering sex workers. The fact that Nyong‘o used interview footage and oral histories of sex workers is empowering also. Allowing these women to speak about their experiences to a wider audience brings attention to the real needs of sex workers. Sex worker-led organizations like the Women‘s Organization for Human Rights Advocacy (WONETHA) in Uganda focus on equipping sex workers via training in functional literacy and financial management, in addition to counseling and reproductive healthcare.

If the criminalization of sex work and the abuses of sex workers continues unabated, it does not bode well for other marginalized groups on the continent. Without formal recognition and decriminalization of sex work, sex workers remain on margins of society and their voices aren‘t heard and needs aren‘t met. Without an open dialogue about the abuses levied agianst sex workers and the risks of sex work, there cannot be any real change. This dialogue has implications in the myriad fights against HIV/AIDS, violence against women, and the fights against homophobia and transphobia. Handing a sewing machine or a tomato to an African sex worker isn‘t addressing the specific grievances of sex workers. Advocacy organizations like the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT), the African Sex Workers Alliance  (ASWA) and the Johannesburg-based Sisonke Sex Worker Movement are bringing the myriad voices and needs of sex workers to the fore.

++++++++++++++++

About aconerlycoleman

I am an alumna of UC Berkeley I am an African-American woman reclaiming her lost heritage I am student of history reclaiming stolen narratives

 

EVENT: Johannesburg, South Africa—Book Launch: Breaking the Silence: Love and Revolution by POWA > Jacana

Book Launch:

Breaking the Silence:

Love and Revolution by POWA

Breaking the Silence: Love and RevolutionWe invite you to join People Opposing Women Abuse (POWA) to celebrate the launch of Breaking the Silence: Love and Revolution and the call for entries to the 2011 POWA Women’s Writing Project.

About the book

Love and Revolution are two words that are rarely used together. Where love is associated with passion, desire and romance, revolution is often associated with revolt, uprising, riot and change, these seemingly opposing emotions. Yet often when we talk about love, what we are really talking about is not just the feeling of love, but its power to transform us in ways that not even we could have imagined, and the more it begins to appear that love and revolution are in fact two sides of the same coin.

Sometimes the most revolutionary act is to love. And sometimes the revolution is an act of love.

This year, POWA have changed the format of their annual Women’s Writing collection. No longer a competition, the POWA Women’s Writing Project not only accepted blind submissions, but a series of workshops were run all over South Africa, helping women to workshop their writing and hone and sharpen their writing skills.

This year’s collection consists of three sections: poetry, short stories and personal essays that tell of diverse women’s experiences of love; romantic love, love of family, love of friends, love of community. Love that has touched in revolutionary ways that alter the way we see and approach life.

Contents include:

Poetry

  • Love and Revolution by Kerry Jane Gutridge
  • Lovely Revolution by Luana Malan
  • Freedom by Nandi Msezane
  • Love, Life and Revolution by Lindiwe Nxumalo
  • The True Definition of a Woman by Nthabiseng Josephine Mofolo
  • Love… to love? by Rose Tuelo Brock

Short Stories

  • The Campaigner by Rose Tuelo Brock
  • Granny for Tea by Natisha Parsons
  • Uthando Lungulhule by Faith Mkhize Sinethemba
  • Sarah and Sorrow by Clairissa Samuels
  • Immortality by Lisa Koekemoer
  • Love and Revolution by Karen Laine
  • You should Know by Nomvelo Myeza

Personal Essays

  • Tears in my Coffee by A J Nabi
  • Am I my Sister’s Keeper? by Joy Lange
  • I can Forgive by Madeleen Theron
  • The Uprising by Sophie Hlatshwayo
  • My Love, my Revolutionary by NoBuntu Mqulwana
  • Love and Revolution by Sibongile Gloria Magagula
  • Fifteen Minutes of Hostage Hell by Nicky Kleinhans

Breaking the Silence: Love and Revolution is published by Fanele (an imprint of Jacana Media) in association with POWA – People Opposing Women Abuse.

Event Details

  • Date: Friday, 27 May 2011
  • Time: 3:00 PM
  • Venue: Museum Africa,
    121 Bree Street, Newtown,
    Johannesburg | Map
  • RSVP: Nehwoh Belinda, POWA,
    nehwoh@powa.co.za, 011 642 4345
    www.powa.co.za

Book Details

  • Breaking the Silence: Love and Revolution POWA
    EAN: 9781920196349

 

VIDEO: Bilal: Is This Love > MonaMade

Bilal: Is This Love

It's always the perfect time to enjoy Bilal. Especially these days when he seems to be really coming into his own as an artist. The self expression with total unabated freedom is a beautiful thing to witness. This Bob Marley cover is no exception to his skills as performer and artist. Do enjoy.

<p class="foxyvideo" style="margin-top:5px;width:480px;font-family:Arial;font-size:10px;"><span style="margin-top:0px;">FULL SCREEN<br/></span><span style="float:left;margin-top:5px;">The Sounds of VTech / bilal_isthislove_web &nbsp;&nbsp;</span><br style="clear:both;"></p>

 

 

PUB: Richard J. Margolis Award

 

RICHARD MARGOLIS AWARD

The Richard J. Margolis Award of Blue Mountain Center combines a one-month residency at Blue Mountain Center with a $5,000 prize. It is awarded annually to a promising new journalist or essayist whose work combines warmth,  humor, wisdom and concern with social justice. The award was established in honor of Richard J. Margolis, a journalist, essayist and poet who gave eloquent voice to the hardships of the rural poor, migrant farm workers, the elderly, Native Americans and others whose voices are seldom heard. He was also the  author of a number of books for children.

 

Blue Mountain Center is a writers and artists colony in the Adirondacks in Blue Mountain Lake, New York.

How to Apply

Applications should include at least two examples of the writer's work (published or unpublished, 30 pages maximum) and a short biographical note including a description of his or her current and anticipated work. Please send three copies of these writing samples. Samples will not be returned.

Send applications to:

Richard J. Margolis Award of Blue Mountain Center
c/o Margolis & Bloom
535 Boylston Street, 8th floor
Boston, MA 02116

Deadline: July 1, 2011

The award winner will be announced in November.

Donations

Donations to the Richard J. Margolis Award qualify for an income, gift and  estate tax charitable deduction as long as they are made payable to the Blue  Mountain Center, a not-for-profit foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the  Internal Revenue Code.  Donations during life qualify for all these tax  advantages.  In addition, gifts of stock or other highly appreciated property  also avoid tax on any capital gain, since the sale of the securities by a  tax-exempt organization are not subject to tax.  While not qualifying for any  income tax deduction, the advantage of gifts as part of an estate plan are that  the donor continues to have the lifetime use of the funds to be gifted when or  if they are ever needed.

Lifetime Gifts

Contributions to the Award fund may be made at any time by sending checks  payable to the "Blue Mountain Center" to:

Richard J. Margolis Award
c/o Margolis & Bloom
535 Boylston Street, 8th floor
Boston, MA 02116

Testamentary Gifts

Gifts may be made as part of an estate plan by using language such as the  following:

"I give $_______ to the Blue Mountain Center, a not-for-profit corporation  located in Blue Mountain Lake, New York, for the purpose of funding the Richard  J. Margolis Award."

Questions

You may direct any questions about gifts or bequests to the Award fund  to:

Harry S. Margolis
Margolis & Bloom
535 Boylston Street, 8th floor
Boston, MA 02116
Telephone:617/267-9700, x517
Fax:617/267-9700, x517 
E-mail: hsm@margolis.com
++++++++++++++++++++++++++

 

Throughout his career, Margolis gave eloquent voice to those who are rarely heard. He was the consummate wordsmith, whose writing style always had touches of poetry even when the subject matter delved into dry public policy issues. He attempted to bring the human story to the forefront, showing how abstract political and policy debates affected real people. Using a combination of humor, eloquence and logic, Margolis tried through his writing to move people -- individuals and politicians -- to come to the aid of people in need.

His career spanned many roles, subjects and forms, which we have organized into the following broad categories:

 

PUB: Submission Guidelines 2011 Open Chapbook Competition

CALL FOR MANUSCRIPTS           

We read general submissions year round.  Please visit www.finishinglinepress.com  for submission guidelines, and contest announcements and results.

2011 OPEN CHAPBOOK COMPETITION

A prize of $1,000 and publication for a chapbook-length poetry collection.
Open to all. Previous chapbook or full-length publication does not disqualify. International entries are welcome.

Multiple submissions are accepted.
All entries will be considered for publication. The top-ten finalists will be offered publication.
Submit up to 26 pages of poetry, PLUS bio, acknowledgments, SASE and cover letter with a $15 entry fee (pay by check, money order or online to pay using your credit card)

Deadline: June 30, 2011 (POSTMARK).


Manuscript must be a paper copy.  We do not accept email submissions.

Send to

Open Competition

Finishing Line Press
P O Box 1626
Georgetown, KY 40324

USA

If paying online, please use the button below (please print out confirmation and mail with submission) :

 

finishingbooks@aol.com" type="hidden" /> finishingbooks@aol.com" type="hidden" />

If you prefer, it is fine to send a check or money order with your submission

instead of using the buy now button.

A self-addressed, stamped envelope (SASE) with the correct postage must accompany all manuscripts. A SASE is needed for any kind of response, even if the writer does not want the material returned.


A good photocopy of the manuscript or a computer printout, rather than the original, should be sent. Finishing Line Press is not responsible for lost manuscripts.