Winners on Winning
Six Authors Offer Advice for Successful Contest Submissions
Six authors offer advice for successful contest submissions.
WE ASKED six writers who recently won contests—from single-piece awards to book-publication prizes to lifechanging fellowships and grants—to discuss how winning (and losing) has affected their careers and to offer advice for writers thinking of entering contests.
AMA CODJOE
of the Bronx, New York, winner of a 2019 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, 2019 DISQUIET Literary Prize, 2019 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, 2018 Georgia Review Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, and 2017 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award.
On Winning: Any time I’ve won an award, whether for an individual poem or as an emerging writer, it has felt like the poetry gods were conferring a blessing on me. And though the money has materially changed my life, it’s the affirmation that is the true gift. It has also changed my ability to carve out spaces that serve my work. For example, the support from the Rona Jaffe award allowed me to pursue longer residencies, which afforded me solitude, shelter, and nourishment that deeply impacted my writing.
On Losing: I wish I could show you my Submittable page, chock-full of rejections. Most writers, dare I say all, experience more rejections than acceptances. This is part of the terrain of being a writer. My attitude toward rejections is that they are invitations to send out more work. I acknowledge my disappointment and then get back to writing. Strange as it may seem, rejections are generative for me.
Advice: Focus on the decisions you’re making with regards to work and time and whether or not these choices serve your larger goals. Or, put another way, try to make more and more choices—even tiny ones—in service of your life as a writer.
LILLIAN-YVONNE BERTRAM
of Lowell, Massachusetts, winner of the 2018 Noemi Press Poetry Award, 2018 Sonora Review Poetry Prize, and 2016 Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize.
On Winning: Aside from the monetary award—not an insignificant feature—winning contests provides greater exposure, which can have a big impact on your career, the size of your audience, and the distribution of your work. I think contests can be interesting barometers of what people are feeling and what they’re not. I mean that in both senses: the moods experienced by today’s writers in these catastrophic times and also what the reading public is interested in reading and what they want to see reflected in what they read. I look at contest wins and losses as a way of “reading the room.”
On Losing: The majority of contests entered are not won. I don’t think things like, “Well, what did I get wrong, why didn’t I win?” Who knows? The readers thought something else was better. I don’t sweat it and keep doing my work the way I want to do it.
Advice: Most contests come with publication, so be discerning. Don’t submit to a contest you wouldn’t be honored to win.
SOPHIE KLAHR
of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, winner of Bucknell University’s 2019 Philip Roth Residence in Creative Writing.
On Winning: Receiving the Philip Roth residency allowed me to dive back into a book I’ve been working on for years, on and off, a research-heavy work that seems to require lots of time to pace around and dream. The accompanying stipend allowed me to do a few nitty-gritty tasks that I haven’t been able to afford, namely paying off a credit card and fixing an increasingly dicey car.
On Losing: Just in the last seven years I’ve submitted to around thirty contests, won two of them, been a finalist for four others, and been nominated for five prizes. That’s a lot of rejection on record, which isn’t even close to the number of rejections I’ve received from regular submissions. No rejection or acceptance has ever changed my writing practices—I do my work, and step back.
Advice: Let go of the results. A rejection isn’t always a no; it can also be a “not right now” or a “not yet.” Just keep writing poems (or stories or essays) that you feel have integrity,
and when they find their true form, offer them to the world. The rest will fall into place.
MARK WAGENAAR
of Valparaiso, Indiana, winner of the 2019 December Magazine Jeff Marks Memorial Poetry Prize, 2018 Press 53/Prime Number Magazine Flash Fiction Award, 2018 Frontier Poetry Open Prize, 2018 Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, 2017 Southern Indiana Review Mary C. Mohr Poetry Award, and 2017 Nimrod Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry.
On Winning: Winning has widened my visibility. In addition to all my other reading, I read every magazine I receive as part of the subscriptions included in contest entry fees—so winning maybe hasn’t changed much, but submitting has certainly widened my reading, and so impacted my work.
On Losing: It’s such a crapshoot. Rejections have to be water off a duck’s back if you’re going to survive. I’m always interested in the work of the winners and finalists. I’m often blown away. Sometimes that’s daunting, sometimes inspiring.
Advice: Read over your work—or have another writer look it over—and look and listen for the work that marries precision of detail to discovery, honest work that earns the reader’s emotions. I also highly recommend using contest deadlines to spur new work, especially if you have no other deadlines in your life. I try to work on something every day. I also try to write toward discovery. To write toward surprise.
EMILY SKAJA
of Memphis, winner of a 2019 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, 2018 Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award, 2015 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, 2015 AWP Intro Journals Award, 2015 Thomas H. Scholl and Elizabeth Boyd Thompson Poetry Prize.
On Winning: Winning the Walt Whitman Award has completely changed my life. On a personal level it marked a meaningful vote of confidence from Joy Harjo, the prize judge. Knowing that a poet I admire so much believed in my book gave me courage and renewed my faith in myself and in my work at a time when I really needed a positive sign from the universe. I used to have the sense that I was writing poems into a void, or writing something that ultimately would matter only to me or to my closest friends. Winning a book prize has changed that because I’m gaining an audience of strangers, some of whom are writers I deeply admire. It’s thrilling, but it’s also unexpectedly intimidating. I guess the stakes for speaking are higher when you know someone is listening.
On Losing: I think I was rejected at least once from every contest I later won, and in many cases I was rejected multiple times without ever winning. I trained myself not to take the single-poem rejections personally, but sending out the book was different. Every time the book was rejected, it felt like a sign of a serious flaw. I was very hard on myself. It was a harrowing process.
Advice: Submitting to single-work contests can be a good way to skip the wait for a dream journal that has a slow slush-reading process, since contest submissions tend to be evaluated on a shorter timeline. Even if you don’t win, a journal will sometimes pull from contest submissions for publication. On the other hand, constantly submitting to contests can be expensive and ego-bruising, so it’s good to be choosy and not burn yourself out.
MEGAN GIDDINGS
of Bloomington, Indiana, winner of a 2018 Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant and the 2016 Atlas Review Chapbook Contest.
On Winning: Winning the Barbara Deming grant gave me two things when I really needed them: confidence and time to write. The money allowed me to take time off from work without having to do a desperate scramble to pay my bills or feel guilty that I was putting my writing over life stability. And I wish I could say I’m a person who is patient and assured in her abilities, but as embarrassing as it feels to admit, I needed the validation a lot.
On Losing: I’ve entered several contests I didn’t win. When I was getting started, it had much more of an effect on me than it does now. Then I would go through the story and try to read it as harshly as possible, trying to edit as much as I could. Now I try not to edit when I’m thinking at all about my career; I try to edit when I’m thinking about the story itself. I was lucky enough to have a teacher tell me to always be loyal to my work. Not blindly loyal but to want the best for it, to push myself. Thinking about winning more things, putting a brief burst of other people’s attention ahead of the writing, will only hurt me in the long run.
Advice: For grants give yourself time to refine and edit. As much as I wish I could just say, “Money, please,” I had to edit and edit toward explaining why I needed money and what my work was about. For literary magazine contests, read the magazine first. Edit and edit. Remember that even though $1,000 sounds great, you still have to pay taxes on it.