Call for Submissions and Contest Guidelines
Holding Each Elephant’s Tail:
Voices from the
Iraq and Afghanistan Wars
The Missouri Warrior Writers Project, in partnership with the Missouri Humanities Council, is pleased to announce a contest and call for submissions for its national anthology of writing by veterans and active military service personnel of Afghanistan and Iraq about their wartime experience. This experience includes deployments and those who have never been deployed. Transition back into civilian life is also a topic of interest for this anthology. The contest will award 250.00 each to the top entries in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. All entries will be considered for publication in the anthology. There is no entry fee. Guidelines are listed below:
-Prose limited to 5000 words. Up to 3 poems (max 5 pages). Submissions that exceed these limits will be disqualified.
- Deadline December 30, 2011. Winners will be announced by April 1, 2012.
- There is no entry fee for submission, but submissions must be limited to one per person per genera
- Manuscripts must be submitted electronically as a Microsoft Word document. (Save with a *.doc extension). Please combine all poems into one document and use first poem as title. Send to: submissions@mowarriorwriters.com
-Put your name and contact information on the first page of your submission document and nowhere else within the manuscript.
-Please include a brief (75 words or less) bio with your submission.
-Work previously published will be considered, but new work is preferred.
-Simultaneous submissions are permitted, but we ask that you notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere. (This will avoid potentially awkward situations.)
-Southeast Missouri State University Press acquires first-time North American rights for previously unpublished work. After publication, all rights revert to the author and the work may be reprinted as long as appropriate acknowledgement to the anthology is made. All entries will be considered for publication.
JUDGES: Brian Turner, poetry. Mark Bowden, nonfiction. William Pancoast, fiction.
Mark Bowden is a best-selling author and journalist. His book Black Hawk Down, a finalist for the National Book Award, was the basis of the film of the same name. His book Killing Pablo won the Overseas Press Club’s 2001 Cornelius Ryan Award as the book of the year. His most recent books are Guests of the Ayatollah and The Best Game Ever. His newest book, Worm; The First Digital World War will be published in October 2011.
Brian Turner (author of Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise) served as an infantry sergeant in Iraq (2nd ID) and in Bosnia (3rd Mountain Division). He received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, an NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. His work has appeared on National Public Radio, the BBC, Newshour with Jim Lehrer, and Weekend America, among others.
William Trent Pancoast’s novels include WILDCAT (2010) and CRASHING (1983). His short stories, essays, and editorials have appeared in Night Train, The Mountain Call, Solidarity magazine, Apple, US News & World Report, the Union Forum, and numerous other labor publications. Labeled a “blue collar writer” by the Wall Street Journal in 1986, Pancoast recently retired from the auto industry after thirty years as a die maker. In recent years, he has been an adjunct professor of English and first mate on a Lake Erie charter fishing boat. He has a B/A in English from the Ohio State University and attended the graduate school of Miami University. Born in 1949, the author lives in Ontario, Ohio.