The Ninth Glass Woman Prize reading period is now in effect, from September 22, 2010 through March 21, 2011. Please see guidelines below. -
To see past winning and top stories click here.
The beautiful illustration on this page: "A Continuous Celebration of All Things Wonderful" by Marta L. Sanchez, www.poetryandart.org, reproduced by generous permission of the amazing artist.
GUIDELINES FOR The ninth Glass Woman Prize:
The Ninth Glass Woman Prize will be awarded for a work of short fiction or creative non-fiction (prose) written by a woman. Length: between 50 and 5,000 words. The top prize for the ninth Glass Woman Prize award is US $500 and possible (but not obligatory) online publication; there will also be one runner up prize of $100 and one runner up prize of $50, together with possible (but not obligatory) online publication.
In addition, there will be two further Anonymous Angel awards of $100 each, thanks to a generous donation from a Canadian woman author who wishes to remain anonymous.
Subject is open, but must be of significance to women. The criterion is passion, excellence, and authenticity in the woman’s writing voice. Previously published work and simultaneous submissions are OK. Copyright is retained by the author.
There is no reading fee.
Previous winners are welcome to submit again for any subsequent prize.
Submission deadline: March 21, 2011 (receipt date; anything received after that date will be considered for a future prize). Notification date: on or before June 21, 2011.
The winners will be announced on this web page. Submissions will not be returned, rejected, or otherwise acknowledged except for the winner and results announcement on this web page. I promise that every submission will be read with respect and with commitment to the voices of women in this world.
Only one submission per person per submission period, by email, with "Glass Woman Prize Submission" in the subject line and the text pasted in the body of the email (no attachments!*) to:
Starting with the Eighth Glass Woman Prize, I no longer accept postal mail submissions.
IMPORTANT:
- "Glass Woman Prize Submission" in subject line
- Text in body of email
- Please put your email address in the body of the email as well
I will regretfully ignore and delete submissions of anything other than specified above, for example: submissions with any kind of attachment*, more than one piece of writing in a given prize reading period, more than 5,000 words, poetry, plays, or submissions without "Glass Woman Prize Submission" in the subject line of the email.
*Please note that some fancy email stationery comes across as attachment; almost all illustrations come across as attachments; please do not use them.
Some additional information
Who judges the contest?
At the moment I am the final judge, but many women writers volunteer to read submissions and make preliminary selections. I am very happy about this because my personal tastes and passions will no longer be the sole criteria for selecting future winners.
How is the prize funded?
The prize is funded with ten percent of my personal income. It is therefore likely to change in the future.
Why?
Because this is something I would have liked to have received for myself. Since I haven’t, at least not recently, and in order to make things right with the world all the same, I feel I have to offer it to someone else.
Why the name Glass Woman Prize?
I’ve been playing with the glass woman concept for a while. I want women to be able to acknowledge, transparently, who we are, and that who we are is not trivial and unimportant, despite the fact that it is not typically rewarded in a man-made and money-motivated world.
Here’s my original description of a glass woman as I would depict her if I were a visual artist: a woman of glass, with a blood system and gut system visible inside her, pipes and veins, and in those there would be bits of poetry, newspapers, roses, sentimental things, baby’s teeth, locks of baby hair, all kinds of lace bits, birds, and foxes, ice-picks, wedding rings, veils, and wedding cake doves, graduations gowns, tarot cards, sacred stones, pressed flowers, and a whole lot of joy and a whole lot of sorrow. She’d have a flute and a piano key, an ankh, everything, anger and joy, hope, hiking gear, rock climbing gear, motorcycle gear, dirt, fear, bras, lilacs, mirrors, underwear.
What about the brittleness of glass? I would make it unbreakable glass, of course: transparent, but shatter-proof.
Kathee from Golden, Colorado provided the following additional food for thought about the mysterious quality of glass:
Glass is tremendously mysterious, neither solid nor liquid; the scientific world, at least, still does not know quite what to make of it, but suspects that even beyond its practical and nurturing ability to allow light through yet keep the harsh elements out, glass promises further understanding regarding the very nature of how things interact:
from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/science/29glass.html:
“They’re the thickest and gooiest of liquids and the most disordered and structureless of rigid solids,” said Peter Harrowell, a professor of chemistry at the University of Sydney in Australia, speaking of glasses, which can be formed from different raw materials. “They sit right at this really profound sort of puzzle.”
Philip W. Anderson a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at Princeton, wrote in 1995: “The deepest and most interesting unsolved problem in solid state theory is probably the theory of the nature of glass and the glass transition.”
Why no reading fee?
Because I absolutely hate the way every other journal or other entity nowadays uses reading fees for contests as fundraisers. I can see their point. I still hate it.
What am I trying to accomplish with this?
I want to help along the cause of women expressing themselves authentically and fearlessly and passionately. It has something to do with a contribution to justice and soul growing in the world.
One of my ex-husbands once said that women don't support each other. I want to either change that or prove it wrong. This is my small gesture of changing the world.