2014 Bethesda Poetry Competition

Joanne Rocky Delaplaine’s poem “Sentenced” was selected by David McAleavey as winner of the 2014 Poetry Contest organized by Bethesda Urban Partnership and Bethesda Magazine. Ms. Delaplaine is a member of The Writer's Center, and she has taken many workshops over the years.  We're glad to post her winning poem. - The Editors

 

Sentenced

 

By Joanne Rocky Delaplaine

 When I think of your arms, I do not think

home, but house on fire, Knight of Wands,

and when we burned too brightly, I’d say

ice on limestone, Nine of Swords...

we were a small country once, Belgium,

fine chocolate, a train station in every town,

but now that you’re dead, we’re Russia, vast,

pierogis and borscht, with the Caspian Sea to cross,

you’re Moscow and I am banished to Minsk,

you’re the crime I’m doing penance for,

you’re my sentence without end.

 

 * * *

 Ms. Delaplaine's comments about her poem:     

Do I feel more at home in solitude or with another/others? What proximity or distance does any relationship need to endure?  A comment about "home" by Diane Keaton in an A.A.R.P interview prompted this poem. I find the images in the Tarot deck intriguing, dense, the way a dream is...

full of possibility.

 

Joanne Rocky Delaplaine is a Maryland native. Her poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, (Walt Whitman and Anti-War issue), Cabin Fever: Poets at Joaquin Miller’s Cabin 1984-2001, Innisfree Poetry Journal, International Poetry Quarterly, The Northern Virginia Review, Radio Pacifica’s WPFW website, and elsewhere. She’s taught poetry workshops at the Great Labor Arts Exchange, and workshops combing yoga and poetry at The Second Annual Mariposa Poetry Retreat, Split This Rock Poetry Festival, and UnityWoods Yoga Center. She consider The Writer’s Center one of her homes and co-hosts Café Muse which sponsors poetry readings in Friendship Heights the first Monday of the month. 

 

 

 

 

And the Winners of the Poet Lore Contest Are...

In honor of National Poetry Month, Poet Lore, a publication of The Writer's Center, co-sponsored a poetry contest with the Enoch Pratt Free Library of Baltimore, Maryland. Chosen from a select pool of Maryland poets, the judges, Poet Lore editors Ethelbert Miller and Jody Bolz, honored four outstanding local poets: Mya Green, Emily Card, Randolph Pfaff, and Margaret S. Mullins. The three place winners will be published in the Fall/Winter issue of Poet Lore. The winning poet, Mya Green, will read her poem, “Responsibility”, at the CityLit Festival in Baltimore on April 12 and her poem has been made into a display at the Pratt Central Library.



1st Place: Mya Green

Mya Green is originally from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She is an independent editorial consultant who earned both her BA in Liberal Arts and MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College (Bronxville, New York).  She served as poetry contest director and editor for LUMINA Journal Volume XI and acted as a liaison for Sarah Lawrence’s 9th Annual Poetry Festival, where she also opened for 2012 National Book Award winner, Nikky Finney. 

Here is an excerpt from her winning poem, "Responsibility":

Feel the vibrations, she'd say. Deep South extracted

from my throat before it could root. We are not of the tribe,
we are a nation: fifteen burials at every stopping place,

sickness with each mile. Little Wolf says
the shaman woman walks in front of my mother

carrying a woven blanket, white. That I am late,
that I am never late.




2nd Place: Emily Card

Emily grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and spent her childhood combing the beaches of Assateague Island.  She loves to seek out new experiences and moves often, having lived in Canterbury, England, and Boston, Massachusetts.  She currently works as a manager at a law firm in Baltimore, Maryland.  She studied literature and design but also enjoys whetting her mind on the sharp edges of science and politics.  Though previously unpublished, Emily likes to write image-rich poems that draw upon her experiences as a 26-year-old wanderer.


 Here is an excerpt from her winning poem, "Saudade":

but I have flown home for the harvest moon,
pedaled my bicycle barefoot every dusk
and stopping, stood
impaled on the spoked shadow

of a wheel that was always in the path ahead,
always dragging another wheel behind.




3rd Place: Randolph Pfaff

Randolph Pfaff is a writer, editor, and visual artist living in Baltimore. His work has been featured in Poet Lore, PANK, H_NGM_N, Revolver, and Heavy Feather Review, among others. He edits the literary journal apt and runs the small press Aforementioned Productions.





Here is an excerpt from his winning poem, "Contiguous":

I am opening this story
with the sound of fun--
sing-alongs on FM radio,

and the erratic drumbeat
of highway wind
pulsing through car windows.

I am showing you a picture
so you'll see what it was like
to be confined in this kind of freedom.



Honorable Mention: Margaret S. Mullins

Margaret S. Mullins divides her time between rural Maryland and downtown Baltimore.  She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, the editor of Manorborn 2009:  The Water Issue (Abecedarian Press) and author of Family Constellation (Finishing Line Press, 2012.)  Her work has appeared in New Verse News, Persimmon Tree, Alehouse, Loch Raven Review, Creekwalker, Magnapoets, The Sun, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Sugar Mule, OVS, and Writer's Almanac among others, and been read by Garrison Keillor on NPR.









To learn more about the Enoch Pratt Free Library, please visit: http://www.prattlibrary.org 
To keep up with Poet Lore in its anniversary year, please visit us on Facebook.

A Splendid Wake Celebrates Washington Area Poetry

Last year's Splendid Wake event drew a standing room only crowd
 

The Washington area has a rich poetic tradition going back to Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, including many literary journals, book publishers, movements, and reading series. A public program this spring is part of A Splendid Wake, an ongoing online project to document poets and literary movements in the nation’s capital from 1900 to the present.   

The event, featuring three panels, will take place from 6:30 to 8 p.m. March 21 at George Washington University's Gelman Library, Suite 702, 2130 H Street N.W. The program is free and open to the public.

The program will focus on experimental contemporary poetry, warrior poetry projects, and African-American intellectual/creative activity during years of segregation in Washington.

Moderating the experimental poetry panel will be poet, writer and performer Silvana Straw. Panelists Magus Magnus, Poets Theatre and "non-mainstream poetics," Natalie Illum, activist, poet and storyteller, a producer of "Capturing Fire," and Derrick Weston Brown, Cave Canem Fellow and founder of "The Nine on the Ninth" reading series, will discuss language poetry, women's community, spoken word, and slam.

A panel on veterans’ poetry will feature Frederick Foote, M.D., director of the Warrior Poetry Project at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Sunil Freeman, assistant director of The Writer’s Center, and Maritza Rivera, an Army veteran, poet, and participant in the Warrior Poetry Project.

In the Shadow of the Capitol, with Jim Beall, astrophysicist, poet, and project administrator of the original oral history project, will provide a glimpse of the two-day event by that name, held in 1981 at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Transcripts of this conference serve as an invaluable treasury of eye-witness African American history. James Counts Early, director of Cultural Heritage Policy at the Smithsonian Institution, will speak about Sterling Brown.

Gelman Librarian Jennifer King launched the digital archive for A Splendid Wake in 2013. The archive is evolving, and new material is being accepted. A blog managed by Karren Alenier also supplements the Splendid Wake archive.

For more information, contact Jennifer King at jenking@gwu.edu or
202-994-0628.

Time to Publish? 'Books Alive!' is Coming Soon!

Guest blog entry from the organizers of the Books Alive! conference, set for March 29.

George Pelecanos and David Stewart at Books Alive! 2013

Ready to catch a publisher's eye? Register by Feb. 28th for the Books Alive! 2014 early bird discount. Hosted by the Washington Independent Review of Books, this year's conference is set for 9 a.m.- 5 p.m. March 29th at the Bethesda Marriott (Pooks Hill).


Books Alive! has quickly grown into the D.C. area’s seminal conference for writers and book lovers of all types. Register before March 1st to take advantage of the early bird discount. Big-name writers will be participating in panel discussions on everything from mystery, fiction, and politics to self-help, cooking, and children’s books. 

This year, a roster of some of the industry's top agents will again be on hand to hear your book pitches. And some of today's biggest names in publishing will speak about their work and the state of the book industry.

Among the list of distinguished guests are Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Maraniss,  MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, bestselling author Laura Lippman, bestselling author Jon Alter, Washington Post columnists (and authors) Fred Bowen and Michelle Singletary, and award-winning cookbook author Joan Nathan. (Click here for the full list of speakers.)

“Within a year of my attending [the conference], my book is on track for publication,” says aspiring author Alison F., one of last year’s attendees. “Without the insights I gained in the interviews with book agents, the panel presentations, and the symposium networking, I would not have found such a reputable publisher and recognition for my work.”

Learn more at www.wirobooks.com  and the Books Alive! homepage. You can also stay connected with The Independent on Twitter via @wirobooks and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/WIRoBooks.

Essay & Short Story Contest

Essay & Short Story Contest

Friday, January 24 is the deadline for submissions to Bethesda Urban Partnership and Bethesda Magazine's Essay & Short Story Contest. Winners will be honored at the Bethesda Literary Festival, April 11-13, 2014. First place winners will receive $500 and publication in Bethesda Magazine

Essay Contest

Topic: Open.

 

Requirements: Essays should be limited to 500 words or less.

Eligibility: Residents of Washington, DC, Maryland, and Virginia are eligible. The contest will take entries in two categories:  High School (grades 9-12) and Adult (ages 18 +). 

 

To upload your submission, please visit www.bethesda.org.

Questions? Please email essay@bethesda.org or call 301-215-6660, Ext. 217

Short Story Contest

Topic: Open
  

Requirements: Stories must be limited to 4,000 words or less.

Eligibility: Residents of Montgomery County, MD and Upper NW Washington, DC are eligible. The contest will take entries in two categories: High School (grades 9-12) and Adult (ages 18+). 

 

To upload your submission, please visit www.bethesdamagazine.com.

Questions? Please email contests@bethesdamagazine.com or call 301.718.7787, Ext 207.

For more information, visit www.bethesda.org or www.bethesdamagazine.com

AWARDS:
First place: $500 and published in Bethesda Magazine.
Second Place: $250
Third Place: $150
Honorable mentions: $75

The first place winner in each contest will also receive a gift certificate to The Writer's Center.

All winners will be published on the Bethesda Magazine and Bethesda Urban Partnership websites and will be honored at a special event during the Bethesda Literary Festival.

High School winners receive: $250, first place; $100, second place; $50, third place. Bethesda Magazine will print the first place Essay and Short Story.

Holiday Book Fair: Sunday, Dec. 8

The Tradition Continues

Last December, we opened our doors for our first annual Holiday Book Fair, a celebration of small presses and their contribution to our vibrant literary community. The feedback we received was so positive that we decided to make it an annual tradition. This year's fair is set for noon to 5 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 8. 

Over the years, our Open House events have given an opportunity to meet workshop leaders, staff and Board members, register for upcoming workshops, buy gift certificates and learn about our programs. We’ll have refreshments through the afternoon.

Sunday's event will have all the features of an Open House and more. Once again we’ve invited editors from area small presses to display and sell their books and literary journals. The festival will be a good chance to meet them, find out what they're looking for, their submission deadlines and more. Over the years, our Sunday Open Door reading series has featured the work of several authors published by many of these presses.

The presses, journals and authors who will be at the festival this Sunday include: Bacon Press Books, The Baltimore Review, The Broadkill River Press, Cherry Castle Publishing, Cottey House Press, The Delmarva Review, photographer Wilson Wyatt, The Free State Review, Gival Press, Plan B Press, Pond Road Press, Washington Writers’ PublishingHouse, Wineberry Press, Poet Lore, and Settlement House.

Starting at 2 p.m. we will also have brief poetry and prose readings by several workshop leaders: Nan Fry, Danuta Hinc, Naomi Ayala, Mary McCarthy, John Morris, Adele Brown, Ann McLaughlin, Aaron Hamburger, and Basil White. 

Click here to read more. 

We hope to see you there! 

And the Nominees Are...

In 1972, Bill Henderson founded Pushcart Press from a studio apartment in Yonkers, New York. Four decades later, the editors of Pushcart continue to solicit yearly input from small press editors on the most exciting of the work they publish. Pushcart’s editors use these nominations in the making of their annual compendium, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. This year, Poet Lore, the semi-annual poetry journal published by The Writer’s Center, selected works from our 2013 Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter editions. The poems selected are meant to showcase the caliber of the submissions we receive year-round. Peruse the list of poems Poet Lore chose and learn more about their authors. But first, enjoy the following excerpt from Alex McRae’s nominated poem.

[from] “Killarney Fern”

by Alex McRae

I drew you into the greenhouse

where a jade vine dripped, unscrolling

from the sloping roof. The weak sun passed

through clouded glass, seeped into a gulley

shawled with moss—and there we found

frothing in a damp corner, shade-loving,

a fern as delicate as curling parsley....

Poems selected from our Spring/Summer 2013 issue:

Robin Becker: "The Weight"

ROBIN BECKER, Liberal Arts Research Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Penn State, has published four collections of poems in the Pitt Poetry Series, most recently Domain of Perfect Affection. She serves as contributing and poetry editor for the Women’s Review of Books, where her column, “Field Notes,” appears regularly.

Chana Bloch: "Cleave"

CHANA BLOCH's most recent poetry collections are Mrs. Dumpty and Blood Honey. She is co-translator of the Song of Songs and books by Israeli poets Yehuda Amichai and Dahlia Ravikovitch. Bloch has new poems in Beloit Poetry Journal, Field, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, and the Women's Review of Books.   

Poems selected from our Fall/Winter 2013 issue:



Photo credit: Jamaal May

Tarfia Faizullah: "What I Want is Simple"

TARFIA FAIZULLAH is the author of Seam (SIU Press, 2014), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems appear in Ploughshares, Ninth Letter, New England Review, Washington Square, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and other honors.

Joseph Bathanti: "Huntersville Prison”

JOSEPH BATHANTI, current poet laureate of North Carolina, is the author of seven books of poetry and three books of fiction. His new book of poems, Concertina, will be published this fall by Mercer University Press. He teaches at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.

Alex McRae:"Killarney Fern"

ALEX McRAE is from London and now lives in Washington, DC. She won an Eric Gregory Award for the best British poets under 30 in 2009, awarded by the UK’s Society of Authors. Her poems have been published in Poetry Review, The Manhattan Review, Magma Poetry, and Gargoyle.

Rob Sulewski: “Late Lunch"

ROB SULEWSKI is a playwright whose recent poetry has appeared in the Bear River Review and Blue Unicorn. He has work forthcoming in Commonweal and Iconoclast, and he teaches writing at the University of Michigan.

To learn more about the Pushcart Prize, jump to http://www.pushcartprize.com/.

A big thanks to our publisher, The Writer's Center (www.writer.org).

Poetry and Prose From The Workshops

As many of you know, our 2:00 p.m. Sunday Open Door readings usually are an opportunity to meet featured authors, who are often reading from their books or from a journal or anthology in which their work has appeared.  We also have a long tradition of poetry and prose open mic readings, with a range of writers, including some who are reading in public for the first time. This Sunday, November 24, we're celebrating just a fraction of the very good writing that is being generated in workshops.  The emails came flying in after we invited workshop leaders to suggest writers whose work should be featured. As expected, there were far too many good authors to be able to include them all. 

Ellen Herbert ("Writing from Life"), one of the workshop leaders who suggested workshop participants, recently emailed about the many essays that have been published:

"By my count at least 26 essays generated from our class have appeared in print, such as The Washington Post's "Style" and "Style Plus" sections, The Washington Post Magazine, The Washingtonian Magazine, the Christian Science Monitor, Bethesda Magazine, as well as literary magazines such as The Little Patuxent Review, The Sonora Review, The Flint Hills Review, numerous online magazines as well as many themed anthologies. "Writing From Life" also had the privilege of reading drafts from Glen Finland's wonderful memoir Next Stop, published by Putnam."

We'll have a reception after the reading, which is free and open to the public.  We've asked the featured writers for brief profiles, posted below, and we've added a few links to their text. 

Before flowering as poet on Whidbey Island, Washington, in the early years of the twenty-first century, Ann Gerike was a graduate student in Glasgow and London for four years (the 1950s); a faculty wife, mother, and university press book editor in Lincoln, Nebraska (the 1960s and 1970s); and a midlife graduate student, clinical psychologist (PhD 1983), gerontologist, and anti-ageism activist (Houston and Minneapolis, 1980s and 1990s). She is author of a collection of poems, About Face: World War I Facial Injury and Reconstruction.  Her previous book, Old is Not a Four-Letter Word, was published by Papier-Mache Press in 1997.  In 2007 and 2008 she won the Stafford Prize in the Washington Poets Association contest, and her poems and stories have appeared in the Crab Creek Review, Cascade, Soundings Review, Alehouse, and four volumes published by the Whidbey Island Writers Association (Gull Rock Press).  Ann recently participated in a poetry workshop with Nan Fry.

Lynne McKelvey divides her fiction writing career into two phases. As a child growing up in  California, she began writing stories in grade school. When she was a freshman in high school, she won the Seventeen magazine short story contest. At that point, her fiction writing came to a screeching halt.  For the next three decades, she read other people's fiction, taught expository writing, and produced papers in various academic settings. Along the way, she married, had children, and started a singles club in Santa Monica, California. With these distractions under control or out of the way, she moved to Washington, where she enrolled in Joyce Kornblatt's fiction class at The Writer's Center and gradually found her way back to writing fiction. Since then she has participated in a number of workshops, including Jenny McKean Moore workshops at GW University taught by Gloria Naylor and Mary Morrissey, Dos Brujas workshops led by Cristina Garcia in New Mexico and Miami, and, most recently, in a year-long master class in the novel taught by Amin Ahmad at TWC. A Real Daughter is her second novella.   

Timothy Redmond is an attorney working at NIH (in a non-attorney position).  A veteran of the Afghanistan War, Tim has been published in 0-Dark-Thirty, a literary journal for veterans that is published by the Veterans Writing Project.  He has been taking workshops both at The Writer's Center and at Johns Hopkins University since  the Fall of 2010, when he enrolled in an NEA-funded free workshop for veterans.  He most recently attended a fiction workshop with Jim Mathews at The Writer’s Center. Tim is working on his first novel about his time serving in Afghanistan with the Special Forces, and hopes to complete it this year.  

Emily Rich is a former Federal employee and community college instructor who is taking some time off to write. She has taken numerous workshops the Writers Center both at the Bethesda location and online. Last summer she was accepted to the Tin House Writer’s Workshop in Portland, OR. Her work has been published in a number of journals including Little Patuxent Review, Greenbrier Review, River Poet’s Journal and Welter. She has just begun volunteering for Little Patuxent Review as a non-fiction reader. Emily lives in Arlington Virginia with her husband and a too-rapidly emptying nest. Emily recently attended Ellen Herbert's Writing from Life workshop.

Susan Silk is the Director of the Division of Policy and Education in the Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare at the National Institutes of Health where she writes policy for the national animal welfare program. During her 30 year career in science and scientific communication, she has served in many positions at NIH including as the senior scientific speechwriter at the National Cancer Institute and as the founding director of the Office of Mice Advice. Susan has participated in writing workshops including the 2013 Santa Fe Science Writers Workshop, Lynda Barry's Writing the Unthinkable Workshop and Ira Wood's Humor Writing Workshop. Closer to home, she has participated in The Writer's Center Workshops including David Taylor's Science Writing, Pamela Toutant's Creative Nonfiction and Liz Reese's Getting Started Creative Writing. Susan has a BFA in Design from Maryland Institute College of Art, a BS in biological illustration from University of Maryland and an MS from University of Maryland in Immunogenetics. 

Cathy Wu has slowly returned to writing after a long hiatus by participating in four Writers’ Center workshops over the past few years, including “My Life, One Story at a Time” with Pat McNees. She has also been using National Novel Writing Month, or Nanowrimo, to put some words on paper, and wishes the best of luck to other Nanoers, especially other non-fiction "rebels." Cathy writes about her family and cross-cultural experiences.