Early November Events

Ex LibrisCreative Writing, Events

There’s one last chance to enter the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival’s 27th Annual One-Act Play Contest, which is accepting submissions until November 1st, 2012.

The Tennessee Williams Literary Festival is looking for never-produced one-act plays with a small cast that run no more than one hour in length.Finding fresh literary talent of all genres is at the heart of the Festival’s mission. The contests have nurtured writers at the start of their careers–and helped them move on to further publications, book deals, and in one case, a Pulitzer Prize.

Grand Prize:

  • $1,500
  • A staged reading at the 2013 Festival
  • A full production of the winning script in 2013
  • VIP All-Access Pass for both 2013 and 2014 ($1,000 value)
  • Publication in Bayou

For more details, read the guidelines and submission.

The Tennessee Williams Literary Festival is also accepting submissions for its 5th Annual Fiction Contest. The deadline for the fiction contest is November 15th, 2012.

For this contest, the Literary Festival is accepting unpublished short stories, up to 7,000 words, by writers who have never published a book of fiction. The fiction contest will be judged by Michael Cunningham, author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours, and Specimen Days.

Grand Prize:

  • $1,500
  • Domestic airfare (up to $500) and French Quarter accommodations to attend the 2013 Festival
  • VIP All-Access Festival Pass ($500 value)
  • Public reading at the 2013 Festival
  • Publication in Louisiana Literature

Read the full guidelines and submission.

There is an entry fee of $25 for both contests.

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The DePaul Humanities Center has two events coming up in the first week of November. First, on Friday, November 2nd, Anne K. Knowles will present “Geographic Imagination’s Role in the Digital Humanities.” See our previous post for complete details.

Next, on Monday, November 5th, from 6:00-7:30 p.m. in room 314 of the DePaul Student Center (a reception will precede at 5:30 p.m.), DePaul Humanities Center Faculty Fellow James H. Murphy will welcome Queen’s University Belfast Professor Eamonn Hughes to discuss “Writing Belfast.”
From the Humanities Center’s description:

Belfast presents the writer with a number of problems. Its reputation as a place of violent political conflict necessitates a response from its writers. Its anomalous status as the only fully industrialised city in Ireland makes it difficult to frame such responses in the conventional terms established in other forms of Irish writing. Belfast, it seems, is very much a place apart and one which resists representation. However, during the period of the Troubles and their aftermath, Belfast has produced a number of remarkable writers. While their work was often a response to political violence, it also stretched imaginatively beyond the Troubles and in doing so began to fi nd alternative versions of Belfast and links between Belfast and other places. What contemporary writers such as Ciaran Carson (in, for example, The Star Factory, 1997) or Glenn Patterson (in, for example, The Mill for Grinding Old People Young, 2012) have come to recognise is that the apparently distinctive problematic of Belfast raises key questions about the nature of the urban and its representation.

Dr. Eamonn Hughes is Senior Lecturer in the School of English and Assistant Director of the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland. He specializes in Irish Literary and Cultural Studies, on which he has published widely, and his current interests are in Irish autobiography and concepts of place in Irish writing.

He is the editor of several volumes, including A Further Shore: Essays in Irish and Scottish Studies (2008), Ireland (Ulster) Scotland: Concepts, Contexts, Comparisons (2003), and Northern Ireland: Culture and Politics 1960-1990 (1991). His current projects are a book on Irish autobiography from the seventeenth century to the present, and a book on ideas of place in contemporary Northern Irish poetry. In addition to his academic work he also organizes the English Society and has been a member of the Steering Committee of the Between the Lines literary festival since its inception in 1996.

The event is free and open to all in the DePaul community.

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Finally, please join the department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse on Thursday, November 15th from 6:00-8:00 p.m. at the DePaul Art Museum for a reading from the new book Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows by Richard Cahan and Michael Williams and just published by Chicago’s own CityFiles Press. Maier, a Chicago-area nanny and amateur photographer whose work–more than 10,000 negatives in all–was discovered after her death in 2009, has recently garnered national attention, including an exhibit at the Chicago History Museum. The new book presents 275 of her photographs alongside interviews with those who knew her best.

Some students may remember authors Richard Cahan and Michael Williams, who gave a talk on campus last fall sponsored by the Visiting Writers Series about their experiences founding a new small press in Chicago. Frustrated by the creative constraints of working with traditional publishers, Cahan and Williams decided to set out on their own. Since 2005, they have been publishing wildly ambitious and stunningly beautiful books. This talk should be of interest to any student who wants to learn about the challenges and potential of starting an independent press.