The Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize, now in its sixth year, honors an author under forty years old with no major book publication. The winner receives ten thousand dollars, publication of his or her manuscript by Lake Forest College Press (with national distribution via Northwestern University Press), a spot in the Lake Forest Literary Festival, nd a two-month residency at the Glen Rowan House, with the time to be spent revising the manuscript. The prize alternates each year between fiction and poetry. It's a great thing, and I'm glad to have been a part of it since the beginning.
This year's winner, Matthew Nye, was selected by guest judge Anne-Laure Tissut, Professor of American Literature at Rouen University, France (some of you may know her as one of the organizers of the 2012 &NOW Festival in Paris).
Matthew Nye's manuscript, Pike and Bloom, is a work of fiction of which Tissut writes "[it] leads the reader into a refreshingly comic immersion in major metaphysical and existential questions." Nye is a graduate of Dartmouth and the University of Utah, and currently lives in that wondrous little outpost of civilization that is Athens, Georgia, where he is pursuing his doctorate.
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| 2013-14 Plonsker Prize winner Matthew Nye |
The Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize is made possible by a donation from a local philanthropist who was impressed by the College’s recently established publishing enterprise, Lake Forest College Press / &NOW Books. The previous winners are:
- Jessica Savitz for Hunting Is Painting (poetry);
- Gretchen E. Henderson for Galerie de Difformité (fiction);
- Jose Perez Beduya for Throng (poetry);
- Elizabeth Gentry for Housebound (fiction, forthcoming in November);
- Cecilia K. Corrigan for Titanic (poetry, forthcoming in Fall 2014).
The 2014-2015 Plonsker Prize will be awarded to a poet under forty years of age who has not yet published a full-length book. Poets interested in applying should submit a curriculum vita, a 30-page excerpt from a manuscript in progress, and a one-page statement of plans for completion to &NOW Books / Lake Forest College press via Submittable.com
The submission period is January 1 through March 1, 2013; no more than 200 submissions total will be considered. There is no entry fee.
