The deadline is approaching for the Wyoming Arts Council’s Blanchan and Doubleday Memorial Writing Awards. The application deadline is March 11. Applications are accepted online via Submittable.
The Neltje Blanchan Memorial Writing Award and the Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Writing Award are made possible through the generosity of a private donor. The Doubleday Award of $1,000 is given for the best poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or script written by a woman writer. The Blanchan Award, also $1,000, is given annually for the best poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or script which is informed by a relationship with the natural world.
Both awards are designed to bring attention to writers in Wyoming who have not yet received wide recognition for their work, and to support emerging writers at crucial times in their careers. Poets, fiction writers, essayists, and script writers who have published no more than one book in each genre and who are not students or faculty members are invited to apply by submitting manuscripts and an entry form by the deadline.
The juror for this year is Eileen Pollack. Pollack graduated from Yale with a BS in physics and earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of the novels “The Professor of Immortality,” “The Bible of Dirty Jokes,” “A Perfect Life,” and “Breaking and Entering,” which was named a ”New York Times” Editor’s Choice selection, as well as two collections of short fiction, “The Rabbi in the Attic” and “In the Mouth,” which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award.
Eileen’s work of creative nonfiction “Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull” was recently made into a movie starring Jessica Chastain and Sam Rockwell. Her investigative memoir “The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club” was published in 2015; a long excerpt appeared in the “New York Times Sunday Magazine” and went viral. Her novella “The Bris” was chosen by Stephen King for “Best American Short Stories 2007.” A former director of the MFA Program at the University of Michigan, she now lives and writes in Manhattan.
A complete list of eligibility requirements and additional information can be found on the Arts Council website at www.wyomingartscouncil.org. For more information, contact Taylor Craig at the Arts Council at 307-274-6673.