SMK Contest
Keats Literary Competition
Intercultural Essay
Memoir Vignette
Novel Excerpt
Religious Essay
Young Adult Poetry
Young Adult Prose
Guidelines / Rules
Elise Kazanjian & Ellen Woods Prose Poem Prize
1st Prize $100 . . . 2nd Prize $50. . . 3rd Prize $25
A prose poem should look like prose, no line breaks, and read like poetry. The Eastern Iowa Review puts it: "A Prose Poem is more than a narrative story told in a generic way; there is surprise in the language, variety in sentence length, but always the unexpected." For an example, see Grace Marie Grafton "Daft". Each prose poem 200 words or less single spaced, each on separate pages,three poems per entry. Amaze us.
About Judges/Sponsors
Ellen Woods (Berkeley, CA) is a memoirist and poet, the author of Warriors in Transition: A Memoir in Twenty-Eight Stories, published in 2014. Her work appears in numerous literary journals including Inquiring Mind, Blood and Thunder, About Place Journal, Street Spirit, In Laymen's Terms, and Marin Poetry Center Anthology. She has received prizes in writing competitions, including Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition and Mendocino Coast Writing Conference, and has curated submissions to the Bay Area Generations monthly literary competition. She is a retired county psychiatric social worker.
Elise Shabas Kazanjian (San Francisco, CA) is a poet and writer who spent the first decade of her life in Tian Jin, China where her father managed an American rug factory. She has worked at Sunset Magazine, as the Foreign Editor at CCTV in Beijing, China, the Administrator of August Coppola's Audio Vision Project for the sight impaired at SF State University, and has been a pawnbroker.Her poems have been published in anthologies and journals including Poets Eleven, New Millennium Writings, A Kind of Hurricane Press, and Minute Magazine. She has won awards from Chicago land Poetry Contest, and the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition. Her essays have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, and her book reviews in the San Francisco Examiner. She is a member of the Wednesday Women Writers, a group of writers who have been meeting for over ten years.
Last Year's Winners (2019)
First Prize: Robin Michel of San Francisco, CA for "In Praise of Figs, Friendship, and Love"
Second Prize: Grace Marie Grafton of Oakland, CA for "Incognito";
Third Prize: Louise Moises of Richmond, CA for "A Sunday Morning of Jays"
Honorable Mentions: Lucille Lang Day of Oakland, CA for "Takamatsu: Ritsurin Garden"; Jan Dederick of El Cerrito, CA for "Hand Trails in Water"; Angie Minkin of San Francisco, CA for "Paying Your Bills"; Vince Montague of Cloverdale, CA for "Music"
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