20th Annual Scissortail: The Poster

Expectations and Submission Guidelines

20^th Annual Scissortail Festival, April 3-5, 2025

Expectations: The Scissortail Festival is a shared experience, and all involved contribute to the success of the event. In the words of poet Major Jackson, who graced the festival in 2022, authors are expected to be “Citizens” of the festival. Authors selected for the program are expected to be a good citizen by attending sessions of fellow authors, and interacting positively with fellow authors, guests and students – the varied audience members of the festival. In short, Scissortail is a Festival celebrating creative writing, not a platform for individual egos, so put your ego in your back pocket, and come share a positive, generative experience. Thank you for contributing to the festive, inspiring, positive vibe, uplifting all who attend.

To be considered for a spot on the program, please send your best work, while considering the following guidelines. Please follow exactly.

* Authors will have not more than 20 minutes to present their material – this is the total time at the mic, including any comments you make in addition to the presented material.

* Scissortail is a reading festival. No workshops, how-to, propaganda or pre-arranged panels are acceptable. Reading sessions feature a mixture of authors and genre.

* Fiction and creative nonfiction writers are encouraged to Excerpt their submission to fit into the time restraints (The appeal of a narrative may, in fact, be heightened by presenting a carefully selected excerpt, rather than speed-reading).

* Due to the number of participants, it is not possible to accommodate scheduling requests.

* Please understand that Ada, Oklahoma is a small town with very limited public transportation and has a limited number of hotel rooms. Ada is a two-hour drive from the Oklahoma City airport, three hours from DFW (in good traffic) and two and half hours from Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Scissortail Festival is unable to provide shuttle service to and from these airports, so please consider these factors before submitting.

* Sessions usually consist of 3 or 4 readers per session. Authors may NOT exceed 20 minutes total time at the mic – including prose, including commentary. Please respect your audience and fellow readers by diligently adhering to time restraints.

Submit by email: 1) complete contact information 2) the title of your program and the work to be considered – please consider the time restraints per reader. 3) a paragraph-length biographical narrative summarizing publications and significant accomplishments (please write bios in 3^rd person).

Deadline for submission is December 15, 2024. The schedule will be announced as early as possible, in January, and certainly by early February at the latest.

Send email submissions to: scissortailfestival@gmail.com. Identify “Scissortail Submission” in the subject line.

Please check your calendar before submitting. Participants are not charged registration fees, nor are authors compensated. Ecuscissortail.blogspot.com is the official location for information, schedules, bios, etc. Please check that site regularly for information and updates.

COVID DISCLAIMER:  By submitting your work to be included as a participant and/or audience member of the 2025 Scissortail Festival, you voluntarily acknowledge that you have been vaccinated for COVID and/or you fully accept all responsibility for any potential health risk when gathering in these public events. By submitting work to be included on the festival program, applicants further agree to hold harmless the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival and East Central University. You also recognize that plans to hold an in-person festival, could be changed at the last minute, as necessary, due to unforeseen circumstances associated with Covid, and/or the festival could be canceled at the discretion of East Central University.

20th Annual Scissortail: Featured Authors

Ken Hada, cofounder of the Scissortail Festival, and director for 20 years, is honored to have been selected by his ECU colleagues to read at the 2025 festival. Ken is the author of twelve collections of poetry, including his latest: Visions for the Night and Come Before Winter, from Turning Plow Press. His previous collection, Contour Feathers (Turning Plow Press, 2021) received the Oklahoma Book Award. Other works of his have been awarded by The Western Writers of America, The National Western Heritage Museum, South Central Modern Language Association and The Oklahoma Center for the Book, and featured on "The Writer's Almanac." In addition to his poetry, Ken remains active in scholarship, writing and publishing regularly on regional writing, literary ecology and multicultural literatures. The “Ken Hada Collection” is held at the Western History Collection Library at the University of Oklahoma.

Julie Hensley is the author of the chapbook, The Language of Horses (Finishing Line Press), and the books, VIABLE: Poems (Five Oaks Press 2015) and LANDFALL: A Ring of Stories (Ohio State University Press 2016). An Associate Professor at Eastern Kentucky University and core faculty member in the Bluegrass Writers Studio Low-Res MFA Program, she lives in Richmond with her husband, the writer R Dean Johnson, and their two children.

ire’ne lara silva, the 2023 Texas State Poet Laureate, is the author of five poetry collections, furia, Blood Sugar Canto, CUICACALLI/House of Song, FirstPoems, and the eaters of flowers, two chapbooks, Enduring Azucares and Hibiscus Tacos, and a short story collection, flesh to bone, which won the Premio Aztlán.ire’ne is the recipient of a 2021 Tasajillo Writers Grant, a 2017 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, the final Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, and was the Fiction Finalist for AROHO’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award. Most recently, ire’ne was awarded the 2021 Texas Institute of Letters Shrake Award for Best Short Nonfiction. ire’ne is currently a Writer at Large for Texas Highways Magazine and is working on a second collection of short stories titled, the light of your body. Her first comic book, VENDAVAL, will be released by the Chispa Imprint of Scout Comics in April 2024. http://www.irenelarasilva.wordpress.com

21st Annual R. Darryl Fisher Creative Writing Contest

East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma presents 

Oklahoma’s Most Prestigious High School Writing Competition 

Fiction: 1st Place $250; 2nd place: $150; 3rd Place $100
Poetry: 1st Place $250; 2nd place: $150; 3rd Place $100
20 Honorable Mention Awards of $25 each

Guidelines:

* All Oklahoma high school students (9th - 12th grade) are eligible.

* Poetry (up to 100 lines) or Short Fiction (up to 6,000 words) is acceptable.

* Limit 5 poems and 1 short fiction piece per student.

* All entries must be the original work of the student.

* All entries must be neatly typed; please double-space fiction entries.

* Entries will not be returned, so keep your originals.

* No identifying marks should be on the manuscript itself, except for the title.

* Provide cover page with contact information: 1) Student’s name; 2) High School and Teacher’s name 3) Classification (senior, junior, etc.); 4) Phone number, Email and student’s mailing address. (Work submitted without a mailing address for each student will not be judged)

* Work may be submitted through conventional mail or email.

DEADLINE: Conventional mail must be postmarked on or before Friday, February 7, 2025. Email entries must be sent via email by 11:59 p.m. on February 7, 2025. There will be no exceptions.

Recognition: The names of winning writers will be posted on this website. Awards will be mailed to students as gift cards.

Poetry Submissions: send work electronically as attached files to jgrasso@ecok.edu or mail to Dr. Joshua Grasso, East Central University, Dept. of English & Languages, 1100 E. 14th St., Ada, OK 74820

Fiction Submissions: send work electronically as attached files to mwalling@ecok.edu or mail to Dr. Mark Walling, East Central University, Dept. of English and Languages, 1100 E. 14th St., Ada, OK 74820

Contest Information: Dr. Joshua Grasso (580-235-3197); Dr. Mark Walling (580-559-5440).  Scissortail Creative Writing Festival Information: Dr. Ken Hada (580-559-5557) 

2024 Undergraduate Writing Contest Finalists

First Place: Glory Curda, Oklahoma City University
"7:00 am Outside Gallup NM":

Second Place: Kaiya Jones, Oklahoma City University
"Their Voice"

Third Place: Cathlena Spencer, East Central University
"A Safe Space to Land"

Honorable Mentions:
Ben Payne, East Central University
"Boys Being Boys"

Ryn Swinson, Cameron University
"Birth Mother"

Kaley Muse, Cameron University
"Lavender Fields in Heaven"

From the Director - Welcome 2024

Welcome to the 19th Annual Scissortail Festival. I am still amazed that decent people from all over the country travel to Ada, Oklahoma to read and listen to others read. But perhaps I shouldn’t be amazed. Perhaps reading to each other, and being read to, is a deep need that too often goes unfulfilled. Maybe Scissortail allows for that need to be met. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about history, about my time with this festival, about your experience with this festival. Thank you for contributing to the festival – 19 of you for the first time – and to all the returners, both presenters and especially audience members. Thank you for making good history with me, with us all.

The History We Are

Hear the crow call.
See the crow flap
against morning light,
wrens secluded
in wintered branches,
a jogger in purple
moves around the lake
in careful trot,
two mallards in shallows.

The sycamores are white.
The cedars are green.
There is no breeze.
Brown oak leaves cling
to what once was.
Everything hangs on
to what has been
while the crow records
the history we are.


On behalf of the many wonderful colleagues and volunteers who contribute so much to these three days, Welcome! Enjoy your time here together at ECU.

Ken Hada

19th Annual Scissortail: The Poster

 

2024: Schedule of Readings

19^th Annual: Scissortail Creative Writing Festival
April 4 - 6, 2024
East Central University
Ada, Oklahoma 

Thursday, April 4

I. 9:30 – 10: 45 Estep Auditorium 

Ky George: Gallup, New Mexico
Fire in the Pulpit
Walter Bargen: Ashland, Missouri
Down the Rabbit Hole of War
Mark Walling: East Central University
One Dalmatian 

II. 11:00 – 12: 10 Estep Auditorium

Nikki Herrin: Wayne, Oklahoma
Progression
Wendy Dunmeyer: Lawton, Oklahoma
Importance of Words
Alan Berecka: Sinton, Texas
Selected Poems 

III. 11:00 - 12:10 Regents Room

Clarence Wolfshohl: Fulton, Missouri
Lo, the Gods
Sally Rhoades: Albany, New York
When the Roses are in Bloom
Josh Grasso: East Central University
The Domovoi

IV. 11:00 – 12:10 Boswell Chapel

Lyman Grant: Harrisonburg, Virginia
November Constellation
Keely Record: Tulsa, Oklahoma
From Here
Brady Peterson: Belton, Texas
Letters from the Edge of the Round Earth 

*** Lunch ***

19th Annual Scissortail: Featured Authors

Kai Coggin (she/her) is the inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Hot Springs, and author of four collections, most recently Mother of Other Kingdoms (Harbor Editions, 2024). She is a Certified Master Naturalist, a K-12 Teaching Artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council, a CATALYZE Grant Fellow with the Mid-America Arts Alliance, and host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry.

Coggin was awarded the Don Munro Leadership in the Arts Award, and the 2021 Governor’s Arts Award. She was twice named “Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times, and nominated for Arkansas State Poet Laureate and Hot Springs Woman of the Year. Her poetry has been nominated six times for The Pushcart Prize, aand Best of the Net in 2022. Ten of Kai’s poems are going to the moon with the Lunar Codex project, and on earth they have been publishedin POETRY, Prairie Schooner, Best of the Net, SWWIM, Lavender Review, About Place Journal, and elsewhere. She lives with her wife in a peaceful valley where they tend to wild ones and each other.

Quraysh Ali Lansana is author of twenty books in poetry, nonfiction and children's literature. Lansana is currently a Tulsa Artist Fellow and a Visiting Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing at the University of Tulsa. He was formerly a Lecturer in Africana Studies at Oklahoma State University-Tulsa where he also served as Director of the Center for Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation. Lansana is Executive Producer of KOSU/NPR's "Focus: Black Oklahoma" monthly radio program, which is a recipient of a 2022 duPont-Columbia Award, a 2022 NAACP Image Award, a 2022 Oklahoma Society of Professional Journalists Award and was a Peabody nominee. Lansana is also the recipient of a 2022 Emmy Award, a 2022 Oklahoma Association of Broadcasters Award and a 2022 National Educational Telecommunications Association Public Media Award for his roles as host and consultant for the OETA (PBS) documentary film "Tulsa Race Massacre: 100 Years Later." Lansana is a three-time International Regional Magazine Award-winning Contributing Editor for Oklahoma Today magazine. A former faculty member of both the the Writing Program of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Drama Division of The Julliard School, Lansana served as Director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing at Chicago State University from 2002-2012 and was Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing there until 2014. His most recent books include, Opa's Greenwood Oasis, the skin of dreams; new and collected poems, 1994-2018, The Whiskey of Our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience & Change Agent, and The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop. Forthcoming titles include Killing the Negative: A Conversation in Art & Verse, with Joel Daniel Phillips, a children's biography of Ralph Ellison, and a series of books on The Black Rodeo. Lansana's work appears in Best American Poetry 2019. He is a founding member of Tri-City Collective and serves on the Board of Directors of the Philbrook Museum of Art and Oklahoma Humanities, is a Curatorial Scholar for The Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art and a Curatorial Board Co-Chair for the Ragdale Foundation. He is a Cave Canem Fellow and a member of the first cohort of the Culture of Health Leadership for Racial Healing Fellowship.

 

Steve Yarbrough is the author of twelve books, most recently the novel Stay Gone Days. His other books are the nonfiction title Bookmarked: Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, the novels The Unmade World, The Realm of Last Chances, Safe from the Neighbors, The End of California, Prisoners of War, Visible Spirits and The Oxygen Man, and the short story collections Veneer, Mississippi History and Family Men. His work has been published in several foreign languages, including Dutch, Italian, Japanese and Polish, and it has also appeared in Ireland, Canada, and the U.K. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the California Book Award, the Richard Wright Award and the Robert Penn Warren Award. He has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. The Unmade World won the 2019 Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction.

The son of Mississippi Delta cotton farmers, Steve is currently a professor in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College. He has two daughters – Lena Yarbrough and Antonina Parris – and is married to the Polish writer Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough.  They divide their time between Boston and Krakow.

Steve is an aficionado of jazz and bluegrass music, which he plays on guitar, mandolin and banjo, often after midnight.

2024: Scissortail Biographies

Aly Allen is a trans, neurodivergent poet, parent, and veteran. She is the author of Paying for Gas with Quarters (Middle West Press, 2023) and the chapbook Approaching Valhalla (Bottlecap Press, 2022). She has been an editor, reviewer, and reader for publications including: The Cimarron Review, Consequence, Glass Mountain, & Inkling. She founded the Military Memoirs Workshop (for veterans, servicemembers, and their families) and Edited the Military Memoirs Journal, featuring the work of a Vietnam veteran and their daughter. Her recent publications appear in: One Art Poetry, Panoply, new words (press), Press Pause, Consequence, New Note Poetry, and @ThreadsLitMag. She won the 2019 Lillie Robertson Prize for Poetry. She holds an MFA creative writing from Oklahoma State University, where she now teaches. Follow her on Threads and Instagram @notasquirrel

Dr. Rubeena Anjum is an educator and a psychologist. Now retired, she is one of the members of the Richardson Poets Group and Dallas Poets Community. Her work has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, The Bosphorus Review of Books, Artistic Antidote UMN Clinical Affairs, Corona Virus Anthology by Austin International Poetry Festival-2020, Art on the Trails: Mending 2021 Chapbook, Word City Literary Journal, Southwestern American Literature, and The Writer’s Garret-Common Language Project: Networks Anthology 2023, among others. Her full-length collection of poems by Finishing Line Press-2023 is titled My Photo Album.

Rilla Askew is the author of five novels, a book of stories, and a collection of creative nonfiction. She’s received the American Book Award, Western Heritage Award, Oklahoma Book Award, and Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her essays, poems, and short fiction have appeared in Nimrod, Tin House, World Literature Today, AGNI, and elsewhere. Askew’s novel Prize for the Fire, about Early Modern English writer Anne Askew, was a finalist for the 2023 Oklahoma Book Award. A new collection of stories, The Hungry & The Haunted, will be published by Belle Point Press in Fall 2024.

Winners of the 20th Annual Daryl Fisher Creative Writing Contest

Poetry Winners:

First Place: Ava Blakley, “Ocean Lovers. ” Edmond Santa Fe (Instructor: Valerie Roberson)
Second Place: Elaine Gao, “Superfluous Verbiage.” Jenks (Emily Stewart)
Third Place: Gabriella French, “Cracked Pavement.” Life Ready Center (Maureen DuRant)

Honorable Mentions:
Sarah Peters, “Pills.” Shawnee (Scott Bartley)
Nora Garrison, “The Echo of an Answer.” Edmond Memorial (Kelly Bristow)
Kailee Long, “Either a Lover or a Hater.” Edmond Memorial (Kelly Bristow)
Chloie Harris, “Motherly Love.” Howe (Rachel Kardokus)
Ava Reno, “Today I Cried.” Kingston (Mrs. Bain)
Landen J, Wright, “Monologue of a Devoted Lover.” Coalgate  (Mary Klinger)
Anna Arnold “Into the Unknown.” Salina  (Mr. Thompson)
Brinley Hines, “Drowning.” Elmore City Pernell (Tina Casey)
Jenna Koehn, “Endings.” Bixby (Heather Thatcher)
Gabryella Whitlow, “Stars.” Schulter  (Vanessa Vancleve)

Fiction Winners:

First Prize: Garrett Riley. “Ant God.” Washington (Instructor: Dawn Lanham)
Second Prize: Faith Lawson. “Doctor.” Ada (Talina Eaker)
Third Prize: Jocelyn James. “Tvska Alla Tek.” Latta  (Hayley Bryant)

Honorable Mentions:
Elaine Gao. “The Girl at Chateau-LaGrange.” Jenks High School (Emily Stewart)
Rachel Prince. “Eschaton.” Coalgate (Mary Klingler)
Sarah Peters. “Not in This Life.” Shawnee (Scott Bartley)
Diesel Johnson. “Neon Angels.” Lawton (Maureen Durant)
Addison Vance. “Tricks of the Light.” Salina (Coty Thompson)
Bella Hendrix. “Glitter Can’t Fix Everything.” Edmond Memorial (Kelly Bristow)
Makayla Bostwick. “A Warm Return Home.” Edmond Memorial (Kelly Bristow)
Nora Garrison. “Takes One to Know One.” Edmond Memorial (Kelly Bristow)
Brady Hackett. “Past the Creek.” Edmond Memorial (Kelly Bristow)
Ava Blakley. “Arson is a Crime, Only if You’re Caught.” Edmond Santa Fe (Valerie Roberson)