In addition to a full year of promotion, a $1000 prize will be presented to the Pen Parentis Writing Fellow at a public reading of the winning work of fiction in a stunning literary location on September 14, 2010 in Manhattan. Entrants must be the parent of at least one child under 10 years of age, but there are no style or genre limitations on the fiction submitted for consideration.
For complete details on how to enter, visit Pen Parentis.
Have you had a chance to read over Cassie Premo Steele's latest installment of Birthing the Mother Writer column? Cassie puts a modern/feminist spin on Sleeping Beauty, and invites readers to do the same with their favorite classic fairy tale:
I invite you to explore the psychological depth that fairy tales can reveal by writing a personal essay that retells a fairy tale in contemporary terms and reveals lessons for mothers today. Please email your submission of 1000 words or less to birthingmotherwriter[AT]gmail[dot]com by March 7th. Be sure to put "Birthing the Mother Writer: 4" in the subject line, and place the text of your essay in the body of the email. By sending in your submission, you agree that your piece, if chosen for publication, may receive suggestions for revision, and you also agree to revise and submit a new version for publication within two weeks.
It's a great opportunity to exercise those creative muscles, and to receive feedback from a stellar writer and editor. Check out some of the earlier columns and reader responses to see how it's been done. Deadline for submissions is March 7th!
Have you read our Essential Reading List of read-aloud choices and now want more? Here are the books editor-in-chief Caroline Grant shared recently on San Francisco's View from the Bay:
LitWorld Founder Pam Allyn's guide to books to read with your kids is What To Read When: The Books and Stories to Read with Your Child -- And All the Best Times to Read Them
Four more great books to read with your kids are:
Liz Garton Scanlon and Marla Frazee's All the World
Peter Brown's The Curious Garden
Cynthia Rylant's All In A Day, illustrated by Nikki McClure
And finally Mary Ann Hoberman's And To Think That We Thought We Would Never Be Friends, illustrated by Kevin Hawkes.
New from All Things That Matter Press -- Contemporary American Women: Our Defining Passages, compiled and edited by Carol Smallwood and Cynthia Brackett-Vincent. This unique collection includes over fifty articles by more than thirty-five diverse American women who revisit, celebrate, and share defining moments in their lives. Readers will see the universal in milestones of body, mind, family, career, and personal empowerment -- whether joyous or difficult, chosen or unexpected, common or rare.
The book's editors write in the Introduction:
3 March 2010
6 - 7 PM
Join Caroline Grant, Lisa Harper, and Nicki Richesin in a bedtime story reading for kids of all ages. We'll be reading some new titles, including Cynthia Rylant's All in a Day; Peter Brown's The Curious Garden; and Liz Garton Scanlon's All the World, plus some old favorites! Bring the kids in their pajamas for a fun evening outing.
Caroline Grant is the Editor in Chief of Literary Mama and co-editor of the anthology Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life (Rutgers University Press, 2008). Her essays about mothering have been published in a variety of journals and anthologies. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and two sons, a life she writes about on her blogs, Food for Thought and Learning to Eat.
Lisa Catherine Harper is Adjunct Professor of Writing in the University of San Francisco's Masters of Fine Arts in Writing program, as well as a freelance writer. Her writing about food and motherhood has been published in a number of journals and anthologies. She maintains a website where she blogs about writing and motherhood at www.lisacatherineharper.com
Nicki Richesin is the editor of four anthologies including What I Would Tell Her (available in May 2010); Crush (forthcoming in summer 2011); Because I Love Her; and The May Queen. Her anthologies have been excerpted and praised in The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, Redbook, Parenting, Cosmopolitan, Bust, Daily Candy, and Babble. She lives in San Rafael with her husband and daughter. For more information, visit her online at www.nickirichesin.com
Books, Inc. Laurel Village
3515 California Street
415-221-3666
The National Education Association is engaged in an ambitious project to produce an important new book on the past, present, and future of the American teaching profession and currently seeks contributions from classroom teachers across the nation.
Surveys and statistical reports are often used to tell stories about America's public school teachers, and the forthcoming book will make extensive use of these sources. But even the best surveys can shed light on only certain aspects of teachers' experiences. The full breadth and depth of teachers' lives--especially the demands, challenges, and expectations they encounter daily--is best represented through the voices of teachers themselves.
To capture the range of teacher voices across the country, NEA is seeking active and retired teachers to write short (no more than 1,000 words) vignettes illustrating the key challenges they face(d) daily as part of educating their students. The book's editors are looking for teachers to draw on their personal experiences to craft anecdotes about their lives as teachers--involving their successes and setbacks, inside and outside of the classroom, and including both instructional and extra-curricular activities.
We invite you to submit your vignette by March 19, 2010.
The second annual SC Artists' Commission Retreat will be held in Columbia, SC and it promises to be even better than last year! No matter your level of creativity, this retreat will engage, inspire, and kickstart you to go where you are dreaming of going. And it's only $45, meals included!
Here's the link: SC Artists' Ventures Initiative
at Think Coffee (1 Bleecker at Bowery, 6 train to Bleeker or BDFV to Broadway/Lafayette)
In Honor of World Read Aloud Day
March 3rd, 8pm
Free of charge
On Wednesday, March 3 at 8:00 pm, Literal Latte will be have four wonderful writers reading aloud at Think Coffee.
The reading coincides with World Read Aloud Day, a program highlighting the joys of reading to children around the world. What better way to do so than to show them that adults enjoy being read to as well. In the spirit of the day, we have invited a class of second graders to listen. We expect they will be our toughest critics yet.
The reading will feature Ben Miller, Anne Pierson Wiese, Luke Fiske and Maria Terrone.
Luke Fiske has published in Connecticut Review, Georgetown Review, The Painted Bride Quarterly, New Contrast, and in A City Imagined: Cape Town and the Meanings of a Place. He won first prize in the Georgetown Review Contest, and 3rd-place in the Glimmer Train Family Matters Contest. He is finishing a collection of short stories, titled The Vanishing Point, and a novel.
Ben Miller's work can be found in recent or forthcoming issues of The Kenyon Review, AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Ecotone, Raritan and The Antioch Review. His nonfiction has appeared in the Best American Essays anthology, and awards include a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Maria Terrone is author of two poetry collections: A Secret Room in Full (Ashland Poetry Press), winner of the McGovern Prize and The Bodies We Were Loaned (The Word Works). She has had work in Poetry, The Hudson Review, Poetry International and more.
Anne Pierson Wiese's first collection, Floating City (Louisiana State University Press) received the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award. Honors include a Fellowship in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a "Discovery"/The Nation poetry prize. Poems have been anthologized in Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (New York University Press, 2007), Poem in Your Pocket (Harry N. Abrams, 2009), and Token Entry: Poems of the New York City Subway (Smalls Press, 2011).
Founded in 1994, Literal Latte remains devoted to keeping free thought free. From 1994-2004, every other month 30,000 copies graced the tables of New York coffeehouses, bookstores and arts organizations. Now it is free online to the world for consumption on laptops in coffeehouses and homes worldwide.
Literal Latte's fifteenth anniversary anthology will be available at the event at a steep discount.
For more info head to www.literal-latte.com, www.thinkcoffeenyc.com, http://www.litworld.org/wrad/
Email LitLatte@aol.com or call 212-260-5532.
Jenine Gordon Bockman
Literal Latte
200 East 10th Street, Suite 240
NYC 10003
www.literal-latte.com
LitLatte@aol.com
Literary Mama is working with LitWorld to celebrate World Read Aloud Day, an event organized to celebrate and encourage reading aloud and to bring attention to the importance of literacy across all countries. Check back for more information on events and readings.
Subject: Call for Submissions: Anthology of Women's Stories of Becoming
The University of Nebraska Women's Center is publishing the anthology Becoming, edited by Jill McCabe Johnson. The editors seek personal narratives and a small number of poems relaying the story of a formative experience that helped shape the woman you've become.
Please send one personal narrative or one autobiographical poem to:
[becominganthology(at)gmail.com] (replace (at) with @)
Files must be in .doc, .docx, .pdf, or .rtf formats. Files should be named with the word poetry or prose followed by the author's last name. For example:
"Prose_Gonzalez.doc" or "Poetry_Albrecht-Hanes.pdf"
Poems should be one page or less. Personal narratives can be up to 1,000 words. Please note: only a handful of poems will be selected for the anthology.
In your email, please include:
Name
Address
Email address
Phone
Title of submission
Genre
If your submission was previously published please include the publication title, edition, and date
For full guidelines, go to: http://becominganthology.blogspot.com/
Thank you. We look forward to reading your work!
Chase the winter blues away and reconnect with your inner author Tuesday, February 9th for a night of readings and conversation with three extraordinary writers: Rachel Sherman, Mark Shulman, and a special guest all the way in from New Mexico -- Meg Mullins. Have a glass of wine in the exclusive Libertine Library bar, be part of a literary movement, and support contemporary writers who are also parents.
Rachel Sherman was born in 1975. She holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. Her short stories have appeared in McSweeney's, Open City, and Story Quarterly, among other publications, and in the book Full Frontal Fiction: The Best of Nerve Anthology. Her book of short stories, The First Hurt (Open City Books) was short listed for The Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and was named one of the 25 Books to Remember from 2006 by the New York Public Library. Her debut novel Living Room is a deep exploration of the ripple effects of mental illness on a family, and received a starred review in Publisher's Weekly.
Mark Shulman has published over 100 children's books of every kind, for most of the leading publishers. His picture books have titles like Mom and Dad are Palindromes, Anagram Gables, and AA is for Aardvark. Mark has also written nonfiction, preschool, trivia, readers, and humor books for adults. His most recent project is his young adult novel, Scrawl, which debuts in Fall 2010 with Neal Porter Books at Roaring Brook (Macmillan).
Meg Mullins celebrated author of The Rug Merchant, joins the Pen Parentis Author Salon while on book tour for highly anticipated novel, Dear Strangers. Her short fiction is widely published. The story that formed the basis of The Rug Merchant appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2002. She lives in New Mexico with her husband and their two children.
DATE: Tuesday, February 9, 2010
TIME: 6-8 pm, come after work!
LOCATION: The Libertine Library at the Gild Hall Hotel @ 15 Gold Street, NYC.
DIRECTIONS: Walking directions from A/C (@ Broadway/Nassau) or 2/3/4/5/J/M/Z (@ Fulton) trains: Walk east on Fulton Street to Gold Street, turn right and right again at Platt.
Walking directions from 4/5 train or E train or PATH: From Broadway take Maiden Lane east to Gold Street (third intersection). Turn left on Gold and left again at Platt.
Enter through the lobby of the Gild Hall Hotel and join us upstairs for a night to remember.