the litpop awards
Pop Montreal and Matrix Magazine: Lit POP is back! Eileen Myles and Sheila Heti to judge the 2013 competition:
The POP Montreal International Music Festival and Matrix Magazine have once again joined forces to rock your literary world with Canada's most innovative and exciting literary competition. We are looking for writing that really pops. So if you can bring the noise with poetry and/or short fiction, it’s time to smash some bottles and trash some hotels (but not really though). If you have what it takes, you will get your work published in Matrix, and get free travel to POP Montreal for a night in your honour.
The winners, one from each category, will receive a round-trip ticket to POP Montreal from September 25–29, 2013, a VIP pass to the Pop Montreal Festival, free accommodation at a bed and breakfast, fall publication in Matrix Magazine with full honorarium, and presentation at a special Matrix Lit POP event during the festival.
This contest is open to residents of Canada and the United States. The deadline for all submissions is June 30, 2013 Winners will be notified in August. Poets are asked to send no more than 5 poems; fiction writers should send stories of no more than 3000 words. Each entry is 25$ and entries and entry fees should be mailed to Matrix Publications, 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd W., LB 658, Montreal QC, H3G 1M8. Please include your email address. Cheques or money orders should be made out to "Matrix Publications." PayPal is also available. Multiple entries are welcome.
NEW: Submit via Submittable:
Entries can also be emailed to Litpop2013@gmail.com and will be considered valid once payment is verified. Full contest rules and regulations can be found at popmontreal.com and matrixmagazine.org/litpop.
This year’s judges are the acclaimed writers Eileen Myles (Poetry) and Sheila Heti (Fiction)!
Eileen Myles is one of America’s most important poets. She was born in Cambridge MA in 1949, attended catholic schools in Arlington and graduated from UMass (Boston) in 1971. She came to New York in 1974. Her latest: Snowflake/different streets is a dos a dos, meaning you turn it over and it’s another book. Inferno (a poet's novel, 2010), Eileen’s book before Snowflake is in fact a Kunstlerroman in which she does chronicle the life of a female poet very much like Eileen Myles. Myles first became known to many Americans through her openly female write-in campaign for President of the United States in 1991-92. Her poetic education took place at St. Mark's Poetry Project from 1975-77 in workshops lead by Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan and others and by attending hundreds of readings for about ten years and then for the rest of her life. Other books include The Importance of Being Iceland/travel essays in art (2009), Sorry, Tree (poetry) 2007, Tow w/ artist Larry C. Collins (2005), Skies (2001), on my way (2001), Cool for You (novel, 2000), School of Fish (1997), Maxfield Parrish (1995), Not Me (1991), and Chelsea Girls (stories, 1994). In 1995, with Liz Kotz, she edited The New Fuck You/adventures in lesbian reading. From 1984 through 1986 Eileen was Artistic Director of St. Mark's Poetry Project. In 2004 she wrote the libretto for the opera, Hell, composed by Michael Webster performed in 2004 and in 2006. In 2010 for the Dia Center for the Arts she created and directed “The Collection of Silence” a large performance piece engaging dancers, poets, children, visual artists and Buddhists in a collective public act of silence at Hispanic Society in NYC. Eileen is a Professor Emeritus of writing & literature at UC San Diego where she directed the program from 2002 to 2007. In spring, 2010 she was the Hugo Writer at U. of Montana in Missoula. In November 2010 she was the Fannie Hurst Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She began teaching in Columbia’s MFA program in Spring 2012 and she’s there this fall and at NYU in spring 2013. She’s also a frequent teacher/participant at Naropa and the SLS seminars. As journalist & art writer she contributes to a wide number of publications including Art Forum, Parkett, The Believer, Vice, Cabinet, The Nation, TimeOut, Book Forum and AnOther Magazine and has written catalogue essays in recent years on Sadie Benning, Cathy Opie, K8 Hardy, Oscar Tuazon, Emily Roydson. and for “The Air We Breathe” show at SFMOMA and “Riotous Baroque” at the Zurich Kunsthaus. In 2007 Eileen received an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital art writers' grant for “Iceland.” Her Inferno received a Lambda Book Award for lesbian fiction in 2011. The Poetry Society of American awarded her the Shelley Prize in 2010. In 2012 she’s a Guggenheim fellow in non-fiction for her forthcoming dog memoir Afterglow. Let more awards and honors come. She lives in New York.
Sheila Heti is the author of five books: the story collection, The Middle Stories (2001), published when she was twenty-four; the novel, Ticknor (2005); and an illustrated book for children, We Need a Horse, (2011) featuring art by Clare Rojas. With Misha Glouberman, she wrote a book of "conversational philosophy" called The Chairs Are Where the People Go, which The New Yorker chose as one of its Best Books of 2011. Most recently, she published How Should a Person Be? which The New York Times Book Review called an "odd, original, and nearly unclassifiable book... unlike any other novel I can think of." The book has been nominated for The Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly The Orange Prize), and was featured on many Best Books of 2012 lists, including in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Salon, Flavorpill, The New Republic, and The New York Observer. Prospect Magazine (UK) called it "last year's most polarising and widely-discussed novel," and Christian Lorentzen of the London Review of Books wrote that it "will be the litty thing the Obama administration era is remembered for."She is currently working on a book collaboration with Leanne Shapton and Heidi Julavits called Women in Clothes about women and their relationship to style. To participate in this project, please email editors@womeninclothes.com. Her books have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian and Serbian. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, n+1, McSweeney’s, Bookforum, and other places. She works as Interviews Editor at The Believer and has contributed many interviews with writers and artists to the magazine. In 2001, she created the Trampoline Hall lecture series (hosted by Misha Glouberman), at which three people deliver lectures on subjects outside their areas of expertise, then take questions from the audience. The shows have been running monthly in Toronto since that time and have sold out every show since their inception. In 2008, she created The Metaphysical Poll, a blog that collected the sleeping dreams people were having about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama during the Democratic primaries. The blog received hundreds of dreams and press in The Washington Post, The LA Times, Slate, The Economist and elsewhere. She has taught or spoken at Columbia University, Pomona College, the Museum of Modern Art, The New York Public Library, in Dawson City, Yukon, at the University of Toronto, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Cuirt Festival in Ireland, Festival Americas in Paris, the Hammer Museum, and other places; and has been in residence at Yaddo, Santa Maddalena and the Fundacion Valparaiso. She appeared in photographs as Lenore Doolan in Leanne Shapton’s book-as-auction catalogue, Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris. She appears in Margaux Williamson’s film Teenager Hamlet, and with her runs The Production Front, which puts on shows and promotes the work of other artists. She studied playwriting at the National Theatre School in Montreal before attending the University of Toronto to study art history and philosophy. She was born into a Jewish-Hungarian family on December 25, 1976, and lives in Toronto.
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