Welcome to 2011 and Contests Reminder

Hey Everyone,

I hope you're all having a good start to 2011, getting lots of writing done and that your merriment in celebration of the new year was satisfactory.

I wanted to remind everyone that submissions are open for our 2011 contests, guidelines for each of which can be found here. We have three contests in the Spring each year, one for each genre. The details are as follows:

49th Parallel Award for Poetry

1st Prize: $1,000
Final Judge: Lia Purpura

The 49th Parallel is the nickname for the US/Canada border that stretches from Washington State to Minnesota. Bellingham, Washington, the home of Western Washington University and the Bellingham Review lies just shy of the border.

The Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction

1st Prize: $1,000
Final Judge: Ira Sukrungruang

Born April 30, 1945, Annie Dillard is best known for her nature-themed writing. She has explored her past and present dealings with nature through poetry, essays and novels. Often compared to Thoreau and other transcendentalist writers, Dillard is unique in her defiance of any strict categorization. As she examines the natural world, her subjects move between wildlife, God and the human condition. Among the nine book-length publications Dillard has published over the past twenty years, her use of multiple genres allows her to seamlessly move from Virginia creeks, to the Puget Sound, to the Galapagos Islands.

The Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction

1st Prize: $1,000
Final Judge: Adrianne Harun

Born in 1945 in Alabama, Wolff has been regarded as the master of memoir and short stories. His best known work, This Boy's Life, recounts the story of his early childhood years in the Northwest and was the basis for a 1993 motion picture starring Robert DeNiro and Leonardo DiCaprio. A three-time winner of the O. Henry Award, Tobias Wolff is celebrated for his collections of short stories, novels, and memoirs. Wolff's second collection of short stories, Back in the World (1985), was hailed as a sensitive work of fiction focusing primarily on the experiences of returning Vietnam veterans. In literary circles, Wolff is revered as much as a teacher as he is as a writer. After completing a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, Wolff served as the Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at that institution (1975-1978). He later spent 17 years leading the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University (1980-97). In 1997, he returned to Stanford where he currently resides and teaches.