SHORTLIST FOR THE 2018 INTERNATIONAL BEVERLY PRIZE!
August 06, 2019 • announcement • beverly • news • prize • publication
The world has few pan-genre manuscript contests for unpublished work, and the International Beverly Prize is one of them.
Last year's winner was British poet David Hale, and the year before, Sohini Basak, a poet from India. The year of the prize is dated from the submission period, not year of publication.
Here is this year's iteration of 11 outstanding shortlisted authors - who will win? Final Judge Niall Bourke will decide soon!
Stephen Haven won the 2011 New American Prize for his poetry collection, The Last Sacred Place in North America. He has two previous collections of poems, Dust and Bread (Turning Point, 2008) and The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks (West End/University of New Mexico Press, 2004). His memoir, The River Lock, was published by Syracuse University Press in 2008. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Salmagundi, The Southern Review, Parnassus, Guernica, The European Journal of International Law, North American Review, Image, Blackbird, World Literature Today, and other journals. Winner of two Fulbright teaching fellowships to universities in Beijing and five Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards in Poetry, he teaches as Professor of Creative Writing at Lesley University, in Cambridge, MA.
A. Loudermilk's essays, which explore the intersectional margins of popular culture to reveal the dynamic relationship between outsiderness or obscurity and creative output, have been published in the Writer's Chronicle, PopMatters, Journal of International Women's Studies, Chicago's Packingtown Review, the UK-based Polari Magazine, and elsewhere. His poetry dates back to the 1990s, when Mark Doty introduced him in The James White Review, and since can be found in dozens of reviews like Tin House, Gargoyle, Smartish Pace, Tampa Review, plus his debut book Strange Valentine. He's taught at Maryland Institute College of Arts in Baltimore and Hampshire College in Amherst.
Joseph Allen Boone is the author of three works of nonfiction, including The Homoerotics of Orientalism (2015), the musical: CONMAN: A Jazz Apocalypse (2010), and seven short stories published in the last two years. One received third prize in the 2018 Hackney competition; another story was among three finalists for the F(r)iction Magazine fiction prize (2019) and finalist in two other national competitions. Furnace Creek, his first novel, was the only adult novel among the seven finalists for the national Leapfrog Competition in 2018. Recipient of Guggenheim, ACLS, Huntington, SHC, NHC, Bellagio, and Bogliasco fellowships, Boone resides in Los Angeles, where he teaches courses in the novel and narrative at the University of Southern California.
Judith Serin's collection of poetry, Hiding in the World, was published by Diane di Prima's Eidolon Editions, and her Days Without (Sky): A Poem Tarot, seventy-eight short prose poems in the form of a tarot deck with illustration and book art design by Nikki Thompson, was published by Deconstructed Artichoke Press. She writes fiction and creative non-fiction as well as poetry, and her work has appeared online, in numerous magazines and anthologies, and in a chapbook of nine prose poems/memoirs, Family Stories (Deconstructed Artichoke Press). She has been teaching literature and writing at California College of the Arts since 1980 and lives in San Francisco with her husband, Herbert Yee.
Laurence Klavan has had short work published in more than fifty literary journals, and his collection, 'The Family Unit' and Other Fantasies, was published by Chizine. His novels, The Cutting Room and The Shooting Script, were published by Ballantine Books. He won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. His graphic novels, City of Spies and Brain Camp, co-written with Susan Kim, were published by First Second Books at Macmillan and their Young Adult fiction series, Wasteland, was published by Harper Collins. He received two Drama Desk nominations for the book and lyrics of Bed and Sofa, the musical produced by the Vineyard Theater in New York and the Finborough Theater in London.
Linda Ravenswood PhD is a poet and performance artist. First published in Sligo as a teenager, her work has been featured in books and journals in the United States, Mexico, Ireland, Germany, and the UK. She was shortlisted for poet laureate of Los Angeles in 2017. Cofounder of the Melrose Poetry Bureau, and the founder and editor in chief of The Los Angeles Press, her work straddles the relationship between performative and literary arts. Much of her performance text has been featured off Broadway, in art galleries and at live theaters. Currently as co-founding member of Project 1521 - a group of International Art Museum curator and scholars, Linda is exploring resonances still experienced in the 500 year anniversary of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico. This work will be on exhibition as text and performance at LACMA in 2021.
Randy Osborne's writing is listed in the Notables section of Best American Essays for 2015, 2016, and 2018. His work has been published in four print anthologies and nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize, as well as Best of the Net. It has appeared in Salon, The Rumpus, Full Grown People, The Lascaux Review, Flyleaf Journal, 3:AM Magazine, Empty Mirror, Fiction Attic, Identity Theory, 3Elements Review, Bodega, SLAB, Lumina Journal, Loose Change, SunStruck, Green Mountains Review, 34th Parallel, Spry Literary Journal, Scene Missing, Thread, and other small magazines, as well as the Chicago Tribune, Atlanta Journal Constitution, San Francisco Bay Guardian, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He lives in Atlanta, where he recently finished a book-length collection.
Ruzena Zatko is a poet and screenwriter who spends her time between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. She received a MLIS with honors from SJSU. In her free time she loves to travel with her daughter and mom, watch movies, and catch up on reading. She is a two-time winner of Scriptapalooza for her Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead spec scripts. The illustrator of the book is Yeju Kwon - who discovered the happiness felt by drawing pictures while working at an IT company. It's then she realized she prefers paper over a monitor, and prefers her cat over most humans. She now draws daily at her home in Jeju, South Korea.
Stefan Kiesbye is the author of the novel Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. He lives in the San Francisco North Bay Area.
Susan Rebecca Wetmore was born in Boston, Massachusetts on May 15, 1954. Her family soon moved from Shaler Lane in Cambridge, Massachusetts to St. Paul, Minnesota; Evanston, Illinois; and, finally, to Bethesda, Maryland. Susan received her BA from Mount Holyoke College in 1975 as a discontented Art major. She was granted a diploma by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1985. Long-distance family camping trips, in a canvas tent, instilled a love of nature and a sense of drifting. She finds structure, order, and challenge in the composing of formal poetry.
Zeeshan Pathan attended Washington University in Saint Louis as an undergraduate where he studied poetry with acclaimed poets including Mary Jo Bang and Carl Phillips. He speaks several languages and translates from Urdu, Turkish, & Persian. At Columbia University, he completed his graduate thesis in poetry under Lucie Brock-Broido, and worked with other talented poets & translators including former U.S. Poet Laureate Mark Strand. Zeeshan is interested in world literature and literary theory, the poetry of the Middle East and India, and he also writes short fiction. His manuscript The Minister of Disturbances has recently been a finalist for a number of poetry prizes and his poems have been featured in the Tarpaulin Sky Press Magazine & Book Awards Shortlist in June 2019.