THE MBF 2016

EMERGING WRITER’S CONTEST

 

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: JUNE 1 (EXTENDED!)

The Montana Book Festival seeks to celebrate poetry, fiction and nonfiction by regional emerging writers. One winner in each genre will receive $200 and their writing will be published on our website. At least one of these three winners will also receive travel support and accommodations to give a reading in Missoula at the Montana Book Festival on Saturday, September 24, 2016. All submitters will receive our decision in early July.

This contest is open to new writers who live in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Oregon and Washington.

Contest submissions will only be accepted through Submittable. All winners will retain rights to their written work. For further information and to send us your writing, please visit our Submissions Page.

ABOUT OUR JUDGES

Jeffery Renard Allen is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. Allen is the author of five books, most recently the novel Song of the Shank (Graywolf Press, 2104), which is loosely based on the life of Blind Tom, a nineteenth century African American piano virtuoso and composer who was the first African American to perform at The White House. The novel was featured as the front-page review of both The New York Times Book Review and The San Francisco Chronicle. It won the CLMP Firecracker Award, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and is nominated for the Dublin Literary Prize. Allen is the author of two other works of fiction, the novel Rails Under My Back, which won The Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Fiction, and the short story collection Holding Pattern, which won The Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Allen has received other accolades for his work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and Whiting Writers’ Award. His website is www.jefferyrenardallen.com.

 

 

Kate Bolick’s first book, the best-selling Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2015. A contributing editor for The Atlantic, Bolick is also a freelance writer for The New York Times, Slate, and Vogue, among other publications, and host of “Touchstones at The Mount,” an annual literary interview series at Edith Wharton’s country estate, in Lenox, MA. Previously, she was executive editor of Domino, and a columnist for The Boston Globe Ideas Section. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

 

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay area.  He has published three books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002), Want (2008), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize, and Chord (2015).  Chord received the 2016 UNT Rilke Prize, and was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award, the LA Times Book Prize, and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award.  He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer.  His poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Threepenny Review.  He lives in Tacoma, Washington and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University.  He is also the poetry editor for New England Review.