Call for Submissions:
The Venture Award
Dorothea Smartt reminds us that the Venture Award competition is now open and invites entries for 2012-2013 competition (judged by Nathalie Handal). The deadline this year is September 30, 2012.
The Venture Award, launched in 2011, provides £1750 in prize money plus publication for poetry pamphlets. The inaugural prize was won by Rowyda Amin—a New York-based poet—whose pamphlet will be released later this year.
Description of Venture Award: Simply, a poetry award for poetry pamphlets, one of the most dynamic formats of published poetry, which helped introduce literary legends such as Dylan Thomas, J. H. Prynne and, more recently, Margaret Atwood. We named the award after an inspirational mentor who died recently.
The first Venture Award competition was opened in 2011 and the winner, Rowyda Amin, was unveiled at the London Book Fair under the auspices of English PEN. [. . .] If a winner is chosen, flipped eye publishing publishes the top two pamphlets entered. flipped eye publishing have a proud history of releasing pamphlets and last year’s winner was excited at the chance to work with flipped eye’s editors: “I’ve literally been dancing with joy the past two days, I’m that pleased. flipped eye has a roster of brilliant poets, so having a pamphlet of mine join such company will be a real honour.” [. . .] The judge this year is Nathalie Handal.
Nathalie Handal is an award-winning poet, playwright, and editor. She has lived in Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Arab world. Her poetry collections include, The Lives of Rain, shortlisted for The Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the recipient of the Menada Literary Award; and Love and Strange Horses (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award 2011, and an Honorable Mention at the San Francisco Book Festival and the New England Book Festival. The New York Times says it is “a book that trembles with belonging (and longing).” Alice Walker lauds Handal’s work as “poems of depth and weight and the sorrowing song of longing and resolve.” She has promoted international literature through translation, research, and the editing of the groundbreaking The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, an Academy of American Poets.
Handal received an MFA in Poetry from Bennington College and a Master of Philosophy in Drama and English from the University of London; she is currently a professor at Columbia University.
For the 2011-2012 Shortlist Readings, see http://www.flippedeye.net/venture/113/highlights-from-2011-2012-shortlist-readings/