Poetry Contest Winner!

Thank you to everyone who supported Phoebe by entering our 2008 Greg Grummer Poetry Contest.

I'm very happy to announce that our judge, Peter Gizzi, has selected "Satire on La Playa a Las Muertas", by Nora Almeida, as the winner of the $1,000 prize + publication. Nora's poem will be published in our Fall 2008 issue.

In addition, the following poems were selected as finalists, and will be considered for possible publication. We received quite a few strong submissions and were able to send a very diverse group of poems on to the judge:

Mary Austin Speaker - "The Leftovers"

Arpine Grenier - "The Heart of the City"

Stephanie Anderson - "This Cleaving and This Burning" & "An Arrangement of Vertebrae"

Angela Szczepaniak - "Pancreas Puddings"

Jonathan Rice - "Inheritance"

Shira Dentz - "and now for contemplation"

Kimberly Lojek - "Vertical [With Russian Blue Gloves and Cigarette Burning]", "[Women Bathing]", & "[Conditional Winter]"

Fiction winners + finalists should be posted soon...

Fall Update #1

School is back in session at GMU and we are looking forward to a wonderful year here at Phoebe, with some exciting stuff in store. Here's a bit of an update on a few things....

Submission Period Open
We are happy to announce that the fall submission period is open and we are now reading work again, so feel free to start sending your poems + storeis our way. Full submission guidelines can be found here.

Winter Contests
We are happy to have Pete Orner (fiction) and Peter Gizzi (poetry) judging our winter contests this year. We will be accepting contest entries until
Dec. 1. Click here for contest details and judge bios.

Fall 2007 Issue
We're very pleased with our latest issue and will post sample work soon. All contributor and contest entrant copies have been mailed. If you've yet to receive yours, please drop us an email, as a few have come back.

Poetry Reviews
In the coming months we will be utilizing our blog to contribute to the discourse about newly released poetry collections, focusing on smaller presses and/or younger poets. We hope to publish 3-4 reviews per month, to get started, and then expand from there. Look for the first reviews to be posted in the next week or so. If you have a book or chapbook that you'd like us to consider for review, send it to:
Phoebe: A Journal of Literary Arts, MSN 2D6
ATTN: Poetry Editor
George Mason University
4400 University Drive
Fairfax, VA 22030-4444

Greg Grummer Poetry Contest, 2008

Phoebe is again sponsoring its annual Greg Grummer Poetry Award contest. The author of the winning poem will receive $1000 and publication in the Fall 2008 issue of Phoebe. Peter Gizzi will judge. We will be accepting entries until December 1, 2007. The entry fee is $15. You can find contest guidelines here.

PETER GIZZI's books include "The Outernationale" (Wesleyan, 2007), "Some Values of Landscape and Weather" (Wesleyan, 2003), "Artificial Heart" (Burning Deck, 1998), and "Periplum and Other Poems 1987-1992" (Salt Publishing, 2004). His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets (1994), and fellowships in poetry from the Howard Foundation (1998), The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (1999), and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2005). He is also the editor of "The House That Jack Built: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer" (Wesleyan, 1998). He currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Poetry Contest Judge

I'm pleased to announce that Peter Gizzi will judge Phoebe's 2008 Greg Grummer Poetry Contest. Peter is the author of four books of poetry, including, most recently, The Outernationale. I'll post a formal bio soon. Contest guidelines and more information can be found via the Phoebe website.

08 Fiction Judge for Winter Contest

I'm excited to say that Peter Orner has agreed to judge our Winter Fiction Contest next year. I've wanted to announce for a while, but we had the 07 contest running, and we clearly still have a long way to go until December 1st, 2007 (the PM deadline), but now you know. So start thinking about submitting and put that date on your calenders.

I've copied his Bio off his website for those of you who aren't familiar with him and his work. If you're interested in learning more, click on this.

Peter Orner was born in Chicago and is the author of the novel, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (Little, Brown, 2006), and the story collection, Esther Stories (Houghton Mifflin, 2001).

The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, a San Francisco Chronicle Best-Seller, won the Bard Fiction Prize and is being translated into French, Italian, and German. The novel is set in Namibia where Orner lived and worked in the early 1990's.

Esther Stories was awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction, and was a Finalist for the Pen Hemingway Award.

Orner has published fiction in the Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, The Southern Review, and various other publications. Stories have been anthologized in Best American Stories and the Pushcart Prize Annual.

In 2006, Orner was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Currently, Orner is on leave from San Francisco State University and living in up-state New York where he is writer-in-residence at Bard College.



That's all for now.

We'll have details up shortly at the official website.
As for the upcoming Greg Grummer poetry contest, I'll check with Wade and then we'll announce what's going on with that when I learn something.

Our 2007 Contest Winners

I'm sorry we've taken so long to post this information, but we've finally gotten our act together. We wanted to make sure we could announce both contests at the same time, and since we're in the middle of finishing this issue, it's been crazy around the office.

Greg Grummer Poetry Award Winner:
Angus Bennett – "On Whether the river Will Break"

Poetry Finalists:
Joshua Kryah for "My Easter"; "Come Hither"
Eliza Rotterman for "Two Girls"
Kimberly Lojek for '[Draft of Interior System of Structure]"; "[Harnessed Dove and Window Broken]"
Reba Elliott for "Child Not Made"; "Los Mineros para Los Minerales"
Arpine Knoyalian Grenier for "The Cables Set, The Light"
Melody S. Gee "Migration"
John Pursley III for "[You Can Look Through These Windows—Look, & Not See Anything…]"



and



Winter Fiction Contest Winner:
John Blair for “The Road to Little Happiness”

Fiction Finalists:
David Norman for "The Great Basin"
M. D. Baumgartner for "Like Gods of the Sun"
Matthew Goldberg for "With a Mighty Hand and Outstretched Arm"
Pierre Hauser for "Girlyman"
Amy Ralston Seife "What We Do"
Alison Hicks for "Texture"
Kristie Smeltzer for "Bridges"
Richard Jespers for "Engineer"


Congratulations to our winners and finalists and thank you to all who submitted your stories/poems. We'll also mail out notification to everyone who provided an SASE. And of course, when we publish, we'll send you along your copy of the contest issue.

Now I must go to class, but check back later for other things.

Fiction Contest Finalists in the Mail

Kelli sent the Winter Fiction Contest finalist stories to judge Nell Freudenberger last week. I imagine we'll announce the list of finalists and the contest winner as soon as Nell gets back to us with her choices.

Thanks to all who entered; I think we had over 140 contest entries this year.

We've now turned our attention to reading regular fiction submissions, which haved clogged up our filing cabinet; those of you waiting to hear from us, we haven't forgotten you.