Fugue’s 2019 Annual Writing Contest is Open
Fugue is very excited to officially announce the opening of our 2019 Annual Writing Contest! This year’s judges are Aisha Sabatini Sloan (prose) and Chen Chen (poetry). Contest winners in both categories will receive $1,000 prizes and publication in our next print issue alongside a brief judge’s comment on the chosen piece. Submissions to the contest are $15. Please note that our “prose” category is and has always been open to both fiction and nonfiction, and that we purposefully select the judge for this category based on their work in both genres.
Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, among other honors. Bloodaxe Books will be publishing a UK Edition in June 2019. A Kundiman fellow, Chen’s work has appeared in many publications, including Poem-a-Day, The Best American Poetry, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He holds an MFA from Syracuse University and a PhD from Texas Tech University. Currently he teaches as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University. With the poet Sam Herschel Wein, he co-runs the journal, Underblong. He lives in Waltham, MA with his partner, Jeff Gilbert and their pug dog, Mr. Rupert Giles.
Aisha was born and raised in Los Angeles. Her essay collection, The Fluency of Light: Coming of Age in a Theater of Black and White was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2013. Her most recent essay collection, Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, was chosen by Maggie Nelson as the winner of the 1913 Open Prose Contest and published in 2017. That book went on to be nominated for the Iowa Essay Prize, and to win CLMP’s Firecracker award for Nonfiction.
Aisha’s essays are included in the anthologies: Trespass: Ecotone Essayists Beyond the Boundaries of Place, Identity, and Feminism (Lookout Books 2018), Truth to Power (Cutthroat 2017), How We Speak to One Another (Coffee House Press 2017) and The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide (University of Arizona Press 2016). Her work has been named notable for the Best American Non-Required Reading and Best American Essays anthologies and nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes. She was a finalist for the inaugural Write-A-House contest in Detroit, the 2015 Disquiet Literary Prize. She recently joined the faculty of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan as a Visiting Professor of Creative Nonfiction.
