The American journal Arts & Letters organizes yearly prizes for writers of fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry. Winners will be published in the journal and receive $1,000. This year, the Nigerian poet Romeo Oriogun will judge the poetry prize, the Zimbabwean novelist Novuyo Rosa Tshuma will judge the fiction prize, and the American writer Kristi Coulterwill judge the creative non-fiction prize.
The deadline for submissions is 31 March 2021.
Arts & Letters was founded by Martin Lammon in 1999 at Georgia College, “where it continues to operate out of the MFA Program in Creative Writing.” The journal is published twice a year, in Spring and Fall issues. Now in its 23rd year, the Arts & Letters Prizes are funded by donors.
Romeo Oriogun is the author of Sacrament of Bodies (University of Nebraska Press); The Origin of Butterflies, selected by Kwame Dawes for the APBF New-Generation African Poets Chapbook Series; and Burnt Men, an electronic chapbook published by Praxis. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Harvard Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review.
Oriogun was the 2017 winner of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. He has received fellowships from Ebedi International Residency and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard. He is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is the author of the novel House of Stone, winner of the 2019 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award and the 2019 Bulawayo Arts Award for Outstanding Fiction, and finalist for the 2019 Orwell Prize, the 2019 Dylan Thomas Prize, the 2019 Rathbones Folio Prize, and the 2020 Balcones Fiction Prize. In 2017, she received the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center Literary Arts Residency Award. Her story collection, Shadows, won the 2014 Herman Charles Bosman Prize.
Tshuma is an editor at The Bare Life Review, a journal of refugee and immigrant literature based in San Francisco. She teaches fiction at Emerson College, and has previously taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Last year, Karyna McGlynn, Desiree Evans, and Lauren Henley were winners of the poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction prizes, respectively. Past judges include Cate Marvin, Devi Laskar, and Jason Allen.
To enter for the prizes, visit here.
