Scissortail Creative Writing Contest for Undergraduates

Prizes: 1^st - $100  2^nd - $75  3^rd - $50

(plus a few Honorable Mentions)

Guidelines:

•  Contest is open only to currently enrolled undergraduate students who attend the festival on Friday April 7, 2017 (no graduate level).
• To be eligible, undergraduates MUST be in attendance at the Festival, Friday April 7. Please do not submit if you cannot attend the festival.
• Submissions must be confirmed by a sponsoring faculty member.
• Submissions are limited to one of three categories: 1) one piece of short fiction (up to 7500 words), or one piece of creative nonfiction (up to 7500 words), or up to three poems (150 lines total).
• Prizes will not be designated by genre, but will be awarded for best submissions.
• All entries must be the original work of the student.
• All entries must be neatly typed; please double-space prose 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) Faculty Member’s Name 3) Institution 4) Classification 5) Phone number, Email address.
• Submit work by email to Dr. Ken Hada at scissortailfestival@gmail.com (and please copy submission to khada@ecok.edu). In the subject line of your email submission, type “Undergraduate Contest.”
•  ECU faculty will screen initial entries, then an outside judge will judge all entries that meet minimum guidelines.

DEADLINE: Email entries must be received by midnight February 24, 2017. There will be no exceptions. Awards and recognition will occur Friday April 7 as part of the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival held at East Central University (April 6-8, 2017). Please visit (and subscribe via email) www.ecuscissortail.blogspot.com to receive festival updates. Contact: Ken Hada, khada@ecok.edu (580) 559-5557.

Judge:  Award-winning poet and professor Ron Wallace will serve as the 2017 judge. Ron is the author of six volumes of poetry published by TJMF Publishing of Clarksville, Indiana and a three time finalist in the Oklahoma Book Awards. He is also a three time winner of The Oklahoma Writer’s Federation Best Book of Poetry Award and a Pushcart Prize nominee for 2016. His work has been recently featured in Oklahoma Today, Poetry Bay, Concho River Review, Cybersoleil journal, Cobalt, Red Earth Review, Dragon Poets Review, Songs of Eretz Review, Gris-Gris, Oklahoma Poems and Their Poets and a number of other magazines and anthologies.

Sponsors: The Undergraduate Writing Contest is sponsored by The East Central University Foundation, Inc, in partnership with THE RED EARTH MFA program from Oklahoma City University, directed by Jeanetta Calhoun Mish. Red Earth representatives will be at the 2017 Scissortail Festival. Information about Red Earth MFA is available at http://www.okcu.edu/artsci/departments/english/redearthmfa

The 13th Annual R. Darryl Fisher Creative Writing Contest

East Central University Presents

Oklahoma’s Most Prestigious High School Writing Competition

Prizes awarded at the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival, April 6-8, 2017

     Fiction:      1st Place   $200                          Poetry:       1st Place   $200

                        2nd Place  $150                                             2nd Place  $150

                        3rd Place   $100                                            3rd Place  $ 100

                                       16 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) Teacher’s name

   3) School 4) Classification (senior, junior, etc.) 5) Phone number, Email and mailing address.

* Work may be submitted through conventional mail or email.

DEADLINE: Conventional mail must be postmarked on or before February 3, 2017. Email entries must be sent by 11:59 p.m. on February 3, 2017. There will be no exceptions.

Winners will be notified in early March, and awards will be presented Saturday, April 8 at the Scissortail Writing Festival held on the East Central University campus, April 6-8, 2017. A list of winners and winning entries may be posted online at on this website, which also includes other festival and contest history and information.  Previous award-winning Fisher contest entries are also available on this site.       

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)

Scissortail Submission Guidelines

12th Annual Scissortail Festival, April 6-8, 2017

Approximately 60 authors will be selected for the program. Competition for a place on the program is keen. Obviously there is a limited amount of time and space available, and unfortunately, not all submissions can be accepted. Selections (and rejections) are determined by members of the ECU English faculty. Selections to the program are accepted on the basis of:

Quality, Published Work (peer-reviewed journals, for example)
Freshness of Material (reading some new stuff)
Appropriateness for Time Restraints and Subject Matter
Meeting the Submission Deadline

Unaccepted submissions often do not reflect quality of writing. All applicants (those accepted and those not accepted for the program) are cordially invited to attend the festival to enjoy the benefits of interacting with fellow authors (the festival hotel rate is available for all guests of the festival).

Even if you have been on the program in the past, please review the following guidelines before submitting. To fit the schedule, some authors will have 15 minutes and some will have 20 minutes to present their material. 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).

Guidelines: Please read closely and follow exactly. Please look at your calendar before submitting! Due to the increasing number of festival participants, it is very difficult to accommodate special scheduling requests. Please do not ask. 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.

Also:

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.

Sessions usually consist of 3 or 4 readers per session. Authors should plan for either 15 or 20 minutes total time at the mic (including prose) depending on how the session is scheduled. In other words, some readers will get 15 minutes, and some will get 20 minutes. Please respect your audience and fellow readers by diligently adhering to time restraints.

Email submissions are preferred. Submit: 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 3rd person).

Deadline for submission is December 30, 2016. The schedule will be announced (hopefully in January) and certainly by early February.

Send email submissions to: scissortailfestival@gmail.com. Identify “Scissortail Submission” in the subject line. (Please copy your submission to khada@ecok.edu.)

Please check your calendar before submitting. Participants are not charged registration fees, nor are authors compensated. Please subscribe by providing your email at http://www.ecuscissortail.blogspot.com in order to receive notice of information regarding the festival and related events. Updates are posted at that site.

2017 Scissortail: Press Release

The 12th annual Scissortail Creative Writing Festival will draw many creative writers and fans alike to East Central University in Ada, Okla., April 6-8, 2017.

Authors Patricia Hampl and Leif Enger will be featured in addition to more than 60 author presentations from Oklahoma and beyond. All sessions are free and open to the public.Patricia Hampl’s most recent books, The Florist’s Daughter and Blue Arabesque, were both among the New York Times “100 Notable Books of the Year.” She is the author of four other prose works and two collections of poetry. Her essays, poems, short fiction, travel pieces and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays and others. Her new book, The Art of the Wasted Day, will be published by Viking Penguin in 2017.

Hampl is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts (in poetry and in prose). She is a MacArthur Fellow, and is Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota, and a member of the permanent faculty of the Prague Summer Writing Program. Hampl is also a Visiting Professor at Kingston University-London where she works on writing related to human rights.

Leif Enger has written two prizewinning novels, Peace Like a River and So Brave, Young and Handsome. He graduated from Moorhead State University and spent 16 years reporting and producing for Minnesota Public Radio. In the 1990s he co-authored a series of Pocket Books mysteries – the Gun Pedersen novels – with his brother Lin Enger. He reads widely, plays electric bass on Sunday mornings, flies kites and sails on Lake Superior. He and his wife Robin live on a small farm in northern Minnesota.

The Scissortail Creative Writing Festival runs from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Thursday and Friday, and from 8 a.m. to 2pm. on Saturday. Each day is broken into several sessions. For a complete schedule of readers, visit www.ecuscissortail.blogspot.com

In addition to the program of authors, two creative writing contests are also recognized during the festival. Prize recipients for the 13th consecutive year of the Darryl Fisher High School Creative Writing Contest and the 2nd annual contest for undergraduate creative writers will also be awarded during the festival. The Scissortail Creative Writing Festival is sponsored in part by the Oklahoma Arts Council. For more information, contact Dr. Ken Hada at 580-559-5557 or visit www.ecuscissortail.blogspot.com.

Collegiate Creative Writing Contest

Congrats to the winners of our Collegiate Creative Writing Contest (from left to right): Kayla Esther Ciardi, Lyndsey Key, and Ashley Loper.

It's On!

As of 9:30 this morning, the Eleventh Annual the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival is under way. If you're not here yet, come soon! We'll be here through Saturday afternoon.