2009 SLS Unified Literary Contest Winners Announced

The 2009 SLS Unified Literary Contest is officially over. It was one of our largest and most representative to date. We want to thanks everyone who took part in it. The sheer number of exceptionally strong submissions, out of the total number of close to 900, made the selection process quite difficult indeed; and we are deeply grateful, for their careful deliberation, to the dedicated SLS readers and the final judges -- Ann Lauterbach in poetry and Lynne Tillman in fiction.

The winning entries will be published in a forthcoming issue of Fence Magazine, as well as the participating literary journals in Canada, Russia, Lithuania, Kenya, and Italy; the winners will receive free airfare, housing and tuition for participation in the 2009 SLS Lithuania or SLS Kenya programs. (The 2009 SLS Italy program has been rescheduled for 2010: we realized it just needed more time to be developed properly, in the difficult economic circumstances the world finds itself in right now.)

Fiction Winners

First Place, for “Permission Slip”

Caron A. Levis is a teaching artist in NYC where she uses creative drama and writing to teach social,emotional, communication, and literacy skills to kids of all ages, teachers, and parents.  She has a BA from Tufts University, an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School, and has studied acting at the Moscow Arts Theatre. Her plays have been performed in NYC & Boston.

Second Place, for “Confessions of a Cerebral Lover”

Rachel Cantor's fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, One Story, Ninth Letter, New England Review, DoubleTake, and elsewhere. She lives in Philadelphia, where she has just finished a novel and a collection of linked stories.

Third Place, for “The Barberini Princess”

Lisa Gornick is the author of a novel,  A Private Sorcery (Algonquin).  Her short stories have appeared in Agni, Confrontation, Five Fingers Review, Kansas Quarterly and The Massachusetts Review, and include a piece selected by The Best American Short Stories as a distinguished story of the year.  She holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Yale, and is a graduate of the writing program at N.Y.U and the psychoanalytic training program at Columbia.  At present, she lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.

Poetry Winners

First Place

Elizabeth Senja Spackman graduated with a degree in Philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley. Since that time, she has dabbled in using her analytical tools to attempt to reorder the world, including working for Rhodessa Jones's Medea Project: Theatre for Incarcerated Women, obtaining an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa, returning abroad to live and work in Paris, France, and teaching poetry to incarcerated youth in rural Washington and community college students in Manhattan. She currently lives in Brooklyn.

Second Place

Ravi Shankar is Associate Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Central Connecticut State University and founding editor of the international online journal of the arts, Drunken Boat.. He has published a book of poems, Instrumentality (Cherry Grove, 2004), named a finalist for the 2005 Connecticut Book Awards, and along with Reb Livingston, a collaborative chapbook, Wanton Textiles (No Tell Books, 2006). His creative and critical work has previously appeared in such publications as The Paris Review, Fulcrum, McSweeney's, the AWP Writer's Chronicle, Scribner’s Best American Erotic Poems from 1800 to the Present, among many others. He has taught at Queens College, University of New Haven, and Columbia University, where he received his MFA in Poetry. He has appeared as a commentator on NPR and BBC and read his work in many places, including the Asia Society, St. Mark's Poetry Project and the National Arts Club. He currently serves on the Advisory Council for the Connecticut Center for the Book, reviews poetry for the Contemporary Poetry Review and along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, is the co-editor of Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East and Beyond (W.W. Norton & Co.)

Third Place

Michael C. Peterson was born in Menlo Park, California and received his M.F.A. in poetry from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. His work has recently appeared and is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, New American Writing, Barrow Street, Fulcrum, and CutBank. He lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

SLS/Matrix Magazine Editor's Choice Award

Mona Awad is a writer of short stories, poems, screenplays and articles.  Her work has appeared in The Walrus, Utne, Maisonneuve, Tidings and onAir.  Born and raised in Montreal, she currently lives in Salt Lake City where she writes and performs in a gothic burlesque show.

Lithuania is our next stop. The program (SLS Lithuania -- as well as its independent SLS Jewish Lithuania component; see the Canadian Jewish News April 1 article on SLS-JL), at this time, is still accepting submissions. In the next few days, we anticipate adding one or two more members to the illustrious list of SLS Lithuania faculty. Now, if you are thinking about it, would be the time to apply, as the program fills up quickly.

We look forward to seeing some of you, hopefully, among our group of writers and scholars in this, as yet largely undiscovered by the international literary community, land of enormous beauty, infinitely rich cultural context, and tumultuous history.

Again, we would like to express our gratitude to all the contest participants and wish every one of you much success in your literary endeavours.

Summer Literary Seminars

Please note that SLS programs, including those offered as a prize for this contest, may be subject to change or cancellation at any point, and without prior warning. If a winner has selected to attend a program that is cancelled or changed, they may elect to attend a future program instead or to receive a cash prize of US$1,500, prize in full. Summer Literary Seminars also reserves the right to substitute a cash prize of $1,500 for any prize offered, and at their sole discretion.

All SLS programs, as described in its publications, brochures and on the website, may be subject to change or cancellation, without prior warning, and neither the Summer Literary Seminars and its employees, affiliates, or agents shall be responsible or liable for any expenses or losses that may be sustained because of these changes or cancellations.