all competitions

In the 1990s, The Kenneth Patchen Prize for Literature was a much-coveted prize administered by Pig Iron Press of Youngstown, Ohio, in honor of famous experimental fiction author, proletarian poet, and Ohio native Kenneth Patchen. Beginning in 2011, the Award will be reinstituted as the Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel, and will honor the most innovative novel submitted during the previous calendar year.

Kenneth Patchen is celebrated for being among the greatest innovators of American fiction, incorporating strategies of concretism, asemic writing, digression, and verbal juxtaposition into his writing long before such strategies were popularized during the height of American postmodernist experimentation in the 1970s. His three great innovative novels, Sleepers Awake, The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer and The Journal of Albion Moonlight, have long been a benchmark for beats, postmodernists, and innovators of all ilks, inspiring younger writers on to greater significance and innovation in their own work.

Manuscripts must be submitted via email as Microsoft Word documents or as PDF files. The $25.00 reading fee is payable via Paypal to egerdes@experimentalfiction.com. Send documents without identification of author anywhere in the file. The name “Patchen Submission” should be followed by a four-digit number of your choice as the file name (i.e. “Patchen Submission 1234”). Attach a second file that states author’s name, your four digit number and actual title). Do not mention the name of the work anywhere in the body of your email. Preliminary selection of manuscripts will be done by JEF and CCM editors, who will select the ten finalists, which will then be sent on for final selection by the judge, famous novelist Yuriy Tarnawsky, himself an admirer of Patchen’s fiction. The winner receives $1000 and publication by JEF/CCM as well as 20 complimentary copies of the book.

Deadline for literature contests' entry: All submissions must be postmarked between January 1 and July 31, 2011. Winner will be announced in September.

website: http://copingmechanisms.net/?page_id=17