2017 Judge: Maggie Anderson

Contest submission window: April 1 – June 1, 2017

A writing practice requires us to slow down, reflect, attend. HeartWood Literary Magazine & West Virginia Wesleyan’s MFA Program seek to honor this practice with an annual broadside series and contest. Partnering with West Virginia letterpress company Base Camp Printing, we print the winning entry (poetry or flash prose) on a limited-edition letterpress broadside featuring an original image inspired by the text. The annual broadside serves as artifact companion to the fall issue of the digital magazine. Both the handmade and the electronic HeartWood venues aim to showcase work that gets to the heart of the matter.

Contest Judge: MAGGIE ANDERSON is the author of five books of poems most recently Dear All, (Four Way Books, 2017) and five edited or co-edited volumes of poetry. She was the founding director of the Wick Poetry Center and founder and editor of the Wick Poetry Series of the Kent State University Press. Anderson was also the Director of the Northeast Ohio MFA in creative writing from 2006-2009 and is the recipient of two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as grants from the Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania Councils on the Arts. Maggie Anderson is Professor Emerita in English of Kent State University and currently lives in Asheville, NC.

Guidelines

  • $15 entry fee (includes a mailed copy of the winning broadside)
  • Contest opens April 1, 2017. The submission deadline for the prize is midnight June 1, 2017.
  • Submit one poem (of any form) or flash prose piece (fiction or nonfiction) per entry; regardless of genre, the entry must be 200 words or less. There is no limit on the number of entries per person.
  • $500 cash prize + 25 copies of limited-edition letterpress broadside will be awarded to the winner.
  • All entries will also be considered for publication in HeartWood
  • All submissions must be anonymous: no name or contact information should appear on the poem or prose piece.  Entries must be submitted via our online submission form manager, Submittable, at: http://www.heartwoodlitmag.com/submit/. We will not accept mail or email submissions, but please do include a mailing address in the Submittable contact fields. We do not accept previously published entries. You may enter simultaneously submitted work as long as you notify us if the work is accepted elsewhere before our contest closes on June 1.
  • 1st round of judging will be performed by HeartWood Editors. Finalists (approximately 20 poems and/or flash prose) will then be forwarded to the Contest Judge for the final round of judging.
  • Winner will be selected by August 1, 2017, along with honorable mentions at the judge’s discretion.
  • Entrants not selected for winning broadside or honorable mention will be notified of contest results and of the editors’ decision about publication of their entries by August 1, 2017.
  • Winner (and honorable mentions) will be publicly announced in the October 2017 issue of HeartWood.
  • Broadside will be printed/mailed October 2017.

Submit Here! 

HeartWood