PUB: Contest Information - Chautauqua Institution

Submit to Chautauqua: Enter online

A prize of $1,000 and publication in the 2013 issue of Chautauqua

This year's contest is open to Flash Fiction / Micro Essay / Prose Poem, and the theme is "Journeys and Pilgrimages."

  • Luke Whisnant will judge.

  • Submit up to two pieces with a $20 entry fee between February 15 and April 15.

  • Multiple entries accepted with separate entry fee.

  • 750-word maximum

  • Please include a cover sheet with your name, contact information including email and phone number, and title(s) of poem(s).

  • PLEASE DO NOT PUT YOUR NAME ON THE MANUSCRIPT.

  • Enter online via submishmash: Submit to Chautauqua

  • We prefer that you submit using our online submissions manager. However, if it is a hardship, entries may be mailed to:
    Jill Gerard
    Attn: Flash Writing Contest
    Chautauqua
    Dept. of Creative Writing
    UNCW
    601 S. College Road
    Wilmington NC 28403

It is our pleasure to congratulate the winner, runners-up, and finalists in the 2011 Chautauqua Poetry Contest.

Theme: "War and Peace"

Judge: Todd Davis

Winner: Kathryn Winograd, "The Lives of Cells"


Runners-Up:

  • Elinor Benedict,"The Consolation of Old Battlegrounds"
  • Bhisham Bherwani, "Between the Wars"
  • Ben McClendon, "Modern History"

Finalists:

  • Liam Corley, "Unwound"
  • Katherine Korth Dehais, "Psalms"
  • Charles Hood, "Maquis"and "Lost Bases"
  • Dawn Marar, "Efflorescence"
  • Christopher Nye, "Poems Out of Music: Eyes"
  • Chad Prevost, "Landscape in a Time of War"
  • Carol Staudacher, "Reading the Names of the Dead"

"The Lives of Cells" attempts to take its reader into an act of horror of such incomprehensible and intimate violence that the very foundations of such ideas as compassion or mercy or peace shift upon their foundations and threaten to dissolve.

The poem presents us with one example of the kind of inhumanity which feeds the thickening roots of all war, of men doing grave harm to women in the name of some cause or religion, and of the ways belief can twist the ideas of familial loyalty into devastating misogyny.

How can we find compassion or mercy in such a tale? How might a poet create more for her reader than mere abject revulsion and dismay, or, worse yet, simple judgment? To my blessed surprise, by beginning with our common origins, the poet braids our bodies together into a revelation of familiarity. We are told about "the cell ever dividing into daughter and daughter, into stone, into peacock, into angels of light."

We are urged to note that this sacred division is "all we have / become, or will be," and so we journey together, unable to look away, as a Kurdish teenager is stoned to death in an honor killing for marrying outside her faith.

But ours is not a disembodied fear, a facile aversion to what is clearly wrong. Instead this fear is answered with a description of stunning intimacy—"first touch of male palm against the budding nipple" and later "her mother’s nipples between his teeth gentled the way mine are"—and, finally, of familial connection as well—"
via ciweb.org