Crab Creek Review 2014 Poetry Contest Submission Period Now Closed!

A hearty thank you to everyone who entered our Poetry Contest. We received a great response and will commence reading very soon. Our finalist picks will be sent to contest judge Sarah Vap, and the winner will be announced mid-July. So stay tuned! And best of luck to all who entered!

100% Endorsed by Archie Bunker - the 2014 Crab Creek Review Poetry Contest

Crab Creek Review 2014 POETRY CONTEST is Underway!

2014 Crab Creek Review Poetry Contest

The entry period for the 2014 Crab Creek Review Poetry Contest begins on February 15th with entries accepted until May 15, 2014. A $200 prize will be awarded for the winning poem. 

This year's judge is Sarah Vap (Arco Iris, End of the Sentimental Journey: A Mystery Poem). 



Sarah Vap grew up in Missoula, Montana. She attended Brown University, where she studied English and American Literature. She received her MFA from Arizona State University, and is completing her PhD at the University of Southern California.

Vap is the author of four collections of poetry. Her first book, Dummy Fire, was selected by Forrest Gander to receive the Saturnalia Poetry Prize. Her second, American Spikenard, was selected by Ira Sadoff to receive the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her third book, Faulkner’s Rosary, was released by Saturnalia Books in 2010. Her fourth book, Arco Iris, was just released in November, 2012, and was named a Library Journal Best Book of 2012. Her book End of the Sentimental Journey is forthcoming from Noemi Press in 2013. She is a 2013 recipient of an NEA Fellowship for Poetry.

Vap has taught poetry and literature at Arizona State University and University of Southern California, and for many years now she has taught creative writing to kids in public schools.

She lives with her family in Santa Monica, CA. 
 

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Contest Submission Guidelines:

*We welcome up to 3 poems per writer, 6 pages maximum.
*The entry fee is $10 per submission. Multiple submissions are allowed, but each batch must be submitted separately, with its own entry fee.
*Please submit works in .doc, .docx, PDF, or .rtf format.
*Choose a standard 12 pt font (Arial, Times New Roman or similar), and standard margins between 1” and 2”.
* Do not include graphics or embed any objects in your document.
* Poetry may be single spaced or double spaced. If formatting preservation is a concern, please send your submission in PDF format. 

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The winner and finalists will be featured in the 2014 edition of Crab Creek Review. In addition, all entries considered for publication. 
 
Submit to Crab Creek Review today!
http://www.crabcreekreview.org/contests.html

Crab Creek Review's 2013 Poetry Contest, Judged by Natasha Sajé

Enter Crab Creek Review's 2013 Poetry Contest!
Judge: Natasha Sajé
Entry Dates: Feb. 15 - May 15
 
*Submit up to 3 unpublished poems
*$10 Submission Fee
*Email Submissions Only
*Winner receives $200 and publication in Crab Creek Review
*All entries considered for publication
Please read our complete guidelines: http://www.crabcreekreview.org/contest.htm

Natasha Sajé’s first book of poems, Red Under the Skin (Pittsburgh, 1994), was chosen from over 900 manuscripts to win the Agnes Lynch Starrett prize, and was later awarded the Towson State Prize in Literature.  Her second collection of poems, Bend, was published by Tupelo Press in 2004 and awarded the Utah Book Award in Poetry.  Her third book of poems, Vivarium, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. She has recently completed a critical book about poetry, Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory.

Sajé was born in Munich, Germany, in 1955 and grew up in New York City and Northern New Jersey. She earned a B.A. from the University of Virginia, an M.A. from Johns Hopkins, and a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland at College Park, for a study titled, "'Artful Artlessness': Reading the Coquette in the Novel, 1724-1913."  Her honors include the Bannister Writer-in-Residence at Sweet Briar College, the Robert Winner and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Awards from the Poetry Society of America, the 2002 Campbell Corner Poetry Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship to Slovenia, a Camargo Fellowship in France, and grants from the states of Maryland and Utah. Sajé was a Maryland poet-in-the-schools 1989-1998.  Her poems, reviews, and essays appear in many journals, including The Henry James Review; Kenyon Review; New Republic;  Paris Review; Parnassus; Chelsea; Gettysburg Review;  Legacy: Journal of American Women Writers;  Ploughshares; Pool; and The Writer’s Chronicle. Sajé has been teaching in the low residency Vermont College MFA in Writing Program since 1996, and is a professor of English at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, where she administers the Weeks Poetry Series.

 

Crab Creek Review Announces 2012 Poetry Contest Results!

Poetry Contest Judge, Susan Rich, has chosen the following poems as the winner, honorable mentions, and finalists of our annual Crab Creek Review Poetry Contest:

Winner:
Leia Penina Wilson-- "And we lost the city we woke up in"

(Leia Penina Wilson’s “and we lost the city we woke up in” is the most interesting break-up poem I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. Part fugue, part country song, part high lyric yearning --- the poem creates a world of broken images in a slow, calm, and utterly controlled measure. There are so many lines I admire here & i crawled inside you and took off all my clothes and still couldn’t exorcise your heart is a line I wish to steal as well as i built a boat with all the towels in your closet &. The ampersand becomes a character of its own moving across the poem to mark different beginnings, endings, and middles. I’ve called this a break-up poem but it could just as easily be a poem of building up a self, constructing an identity through loss and love; the way we all must do.  ~Susan Rich)

Honorable Mentions:
Dave Jarecki-- "Nona Says As I’m Leaving for College"

(The juxtaposition of ordinary phrasing made extraordinary hooks me with each reading of “Nona Says As I’m Leaving for College”:  Stay off the weed, the dope. Don’t think/ is a line that delights me each time I read it. ~Susan Rich)

Greg Nicholl-- "Later I Dreamt the Black Rabbit"

(“Later I Dreamt the Black Rabbit” mixes the real with the surreal creating a world where to purchase a train ticket to a strange town / because you like the sound of its name, makes perfect sense. This is a poem I want to live inside of. ~Susan Rich)

Matthew Guenette-- "A Failure of Spring Rain"
(“A Failure of Spring Rain” is a poem drenched in summer love and a nostalgia told wild and fresh: bass banged so low it migrained our knees, but wasn’t it good, that gasoline smell? ~Susan Rich)

Jessica Walsh-- "The Balloon Artist Falls in Love"
(In “The Balloon Artist Falls in Love” I admire the poet’s cinematic images of “giraffes” and “beach skeletons,” “burning dollars” and “the moon’s terrible failure” which come together to create a trancelike state in this reader’s mind. ~Susan Rich)

Finalists (in alphabetical order):

Judith Barrington-- "Lake Patzcuaro"
Judith Barrington-- "Not a Credo"
Dave Byrd-- "Spring Cleaning"
Katie Eberhart-- "Efficiency Is A Force of Nature As Well As Economics"
Katharine Ogle-- "Riddle For Hunger"
Anna Scotti-- "Philadelphia"
Anna Scotti-- "Save Me a Slice of Raisin Toast…"
Claire Skinner-- "What’s New"
Maya Jewell Zeller-- "The Big Quiet"

Thank you to Susan Rich for judging our contest and to our poetry editor, Ronda Broatch. We received a large number of incredible poems this year. Thank you to all of the poets who entered--we enjoyed reading your work!

Look for all of these poems in Crab Creek Review 2013 v.1.

Crab Creek Review's Annual Poetry Contest (2012): March 1st - May 31st

Enter Crab Creek Review's 2012 Poetry Contest! This year's submission period is March 1st - May 31st. Our guest judge is award winning poet, Susan Rich.

• Submit up to 3 previously unpublished poems
• $200 prize and publication in Crab Creek Review
• $10 entry fee
• All entries considered for publication
• Email submissions only

For complete guidelines, please visit: http://www.crabcreekreview.org/contest.htm

Susan Rich (guest contest judge) is the author of three collections of poetry, The Alchemist’s Kitchen (2010) which was named a finalist for the Foreword Prize and the Washington State Book Award, Cures Include Travel (2006), and The Cartographer’s Tongue / Poems of the World (2000) which won the PEN West Award for Poetry. She has received awards from The Times Literary Supplement of London, Peace Corps Writers and the Fulbright Foundation. Her featured appearances include the Cuirt Literary Festival in Galway, Ireland and the University of Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina. Recent poems have been published in the Antioch Review, Harvard Review, Gettysburg Review, Poetry International, Poetry Ireland, The Southern Review, New England Review, and The Women’s Review of Books. Born and educated in Boston, Massachusetts, Susan now makes her home in Seattle, WA. This summer she will be returning to Ireland to teach at Anam Cara Writers Retreat. For more information on Susan see her at website (http://www.susanrich.net/) or at her blog, The Alchemist’s Kitchen http://thealchemistskitchen.blogspot.com/

Crab Creek Review's 2011 Poetry Contest--The Results!

Thank you to all of the poets who entered Crab Creek Review's 2011 Poetry Contest and special thanks to our wonderful judge, Dorianne Laux and to our poetry editor, Lana Hechtman Ayers.

Winner:

"Widowing" by Laura E. Davis. Dorianne Laux writes, "This poem reminds me of a Ruth Stone poem, both in its subject, and in the simple, precise details that reveal worlds.The irony of "That happy nighttime" the contortion of sadness in "her body a backward question mark", the anti-romantic "stump of a man". I admire the way the poem leaps into a vision of the difficulties of not only writing of grief, but into what could be a definition of grief itself: "curled strings" "bitter taste of an empty hearth", "the foggy hunger of widowing". This poem finishes with a sound image, one that can almost be heard, the subtle, and exquisitely lonely sound of a whiskey glass being lifted and then set back down. Lovely poem."

Honorable Mentions:

"The Contours of the Lake Lost to Cloud" by Jill Osier "is made from careful listening, and such a wonderful unexpected ending." ~Dorianne Laux

"Boundaries" by Claire Zoghb "is a poem that allows the reader access to a large political argument through a domestic and quite personal exchange." ~Dorianne Laux

"Seeing You" by Maya Jewell Zeller "is a visual treat. I loved those 'vertebrae a mouth stacked on a mouth'." ~Dorianne Laux

Finalists:

"Gretel Remembers" by Brent Calderwood
"Fairy Tale" by Rebecca Foust
"Someday My Stomach Will Be a Museum" by Jill Osier
"Love: Sun::" by Ben Purkert
"Relative Identity" by Cindy Steward Rinier
"Elegy/Elk River" by Michael Schmeltzer
"Tautology" by Michael Schmeltzer
"Departure" by John Willson
"Divorce on Mars" by Francine Witte


Congratulations to Laura E. Davis and to all of the Honorable Mentions and Finalists! Look for all of these poems in Crab Creek Review 2012 v. I.

Crab Creek Review's Annual Poetry Contest--Judge: Dorianne Laux

Submit now to Crab Creek Review's 2011 Poetry Contest (March 15th-June 30th):
Guest Judge: Dorianne Laux
•Submit up to 5 previously unpublished poems
•Entry fee: $10, check payable to Crab Creek Review
•The winning poet will receive $200 and publication in Crab Creek Review
•All entries will be considered for publication

Please read our complete guidelines here: http://www.crabcreekreview.org/contest.htm

Dorianne Laux’s fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon, is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also author of Awake, What We Carry, finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, and Smoke, as well as two fine small press editions, Superman: The Chapbook and Dark Charms, both from Red Dragonfly Press. Co-author of The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry, she’s the recipient of two Best American Poetry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Widely anthologized, her work has appeared in the Best of APR, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and The Best of the Net. She and her husband, poet Joseph Millar, moved to Raleigh in 2008 where she teaches poetry in the MFA program at North Carolina State University.

Crab Creek Review Announces 2010 Poetry Contest Winners

The quality of work submitted was extremely high which made judging very difficult. Our guest judge, Nancy Pagh, commented that she enjoyed every single poem. All sixteen selected finalists will be published. Her choices are:

Winner:
“Finding Randy in Window Creek”— Cameron Aveson

Honorable Mention:
“The Perfect Sentence”—Cameron Aveson
“Chicken Day”—Hannah Oberman-Breindel
“I Would Have Had Some Other Version of You, That’s All”—Valarie Jonas
“Ontology”—Claire McQuerry
“Banishment at Noon”—Tina Schumann

Finalists:
“Bonnard Remembers Marthe in Evening Light”—Mary Jo Balistreri
“Aesop’s Table”—Deborah Doolittle
“The Produce and Me”—Matthew Guenette
“Bootlaces Stay Tight”—Sky Joiner
“Cemetery of Glass”—Greg Nicholl
“Hush”—Susan Sample
“Watching a Gull at Cannon Beach”—Linda Strever
“The Fitting”—Jeanne Wagner
“Don’t Bring Yourself, Just Gifts”—Jody Zorgdrager
“Why So Many Poets Commit Suicide”—Jody Zorgdrager

Congratulations to all of the selected poets. And to all of our participants, keep writing those wonderful poems and thank you for supporting our nonprofit independent literary journal. We greatly appreciate your entries.

Look for all these poems in Crab Creek Review 2011, Vol.I.
And, special thanks to our wonderful poetry editor, Lana Hechtman Ayers.

Crab Creek Review's Annual Poetry Contest (Feb.1-May 31) Guest Judge: Nancy Pagh

Beginning February 1st, we are accepting submissions for our 2010 Poetry Contest!

•Submit up to 5 previously unpublished poems
•Entry fee: $10, check payable to Crab Creek Review
•Deadline for all submissions: May 31, 2010
•The winner will receive $200 and publication in CCR 2010 Vol.II
•All entries will be considered for publication
•Guest Judge: Crab Creek Review Advisory Board member and poet, Nancy Pagh
Please read the complete guidelines on our contest page.

Nancy Pagh is the author of No Sweeter Fat (Autumn House Press, 2007) and After (Floating Bridge Press, 2008), and her poems appear in many publications, including Crab Creek Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Fourth River, The Bellingham Review, O magazine, and When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poems by American Women. She received an Artist Trust fellowship in 2007 and was the 2008 D. H. Lawrence Fellow at the Taos Summer Writers Conference. An enthusiastic performer, she was a featured poet at the Skagit River Poetry Festival and a headliner in the Gist Street Masters Series in Pittsburgh. She has taught workshops at the Whidbey Island Writers Association conference and with the Field’s End program on Bainbridge Island. She currently teaches at Western Washington University. http://www.autumnhouse.org/catalog/no-sweeter-fat-by-nancy-pagh/

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And The Winners Are... (2009 Crab Creek Review Poetry Contest)

Our Poetry Editor, Lana Hechtman Ayers, wrote such a wonderful announcement letter to all of the poets who submitted work for our annual Poetry Contest, we are going to post it here verbatim:

All of us at Crab Creek Review sincerely thank you for entering our 2009 poetry contest. The hundreds of wonderful poems we received made it an enjoyable yet challenging process to judge. Aimee Nezhukumatathil has selected the following poems:

Winner
"bring back the knife" by Victor David Sandiego

Runner-Up
“My Eyebrows” by Molly Tenenbaum

Honorable Mentions
"The Cure For Headaches" by Kate Lebo
"The Aprons of Adam and Eve" by Molly Tenenbaum

Finalists
"And What If Bookmarks Are Claustrophobic" by Josh Cooper
"Fitness For Duty" by Rachel Contreni Flynn
"That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do" by Rachel Contreni Flynn
"Dear Reader" by Deborah Hauser
"Not Sorry" by Kate Lebo
"Greed" by Cati Porter

We are grateful for your confidence in Crab Creek Review and hope you will allow us to consider more of your work in the future.

Wishing you all the best in your poetry endeavors,

The Editors

Our New Issue (Fall/Wtr 2009) is Available! (and other Crab Creek Review news)

Visit our website http://www.crabcreekreview.org/ to purchase a copy!

We are so happy to tell you our new issue of Crab Creek Review (Fall/Wtr 2009) is available with new work from: Denise Duhamel, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Peter Pereira, Susan Rich, Martha Silano, Peggy Shumaker, Nancy Pagh, Jenifer Lawrence, Elizabeth Austen, Barbara Crooker, Susan Elbe, Michelle Bitting, Jim Daniels, Kevin Miller, Bethany Reid, and others.

You can purchase your copy or subscribe here.

For a little peek of what's inside, here's the opening from Denise Duhamel's incredible poem, "Kiss Me You Fool," When we were first datingI bought you a pair of wind-up lips...

Or sample Nancy Pagh's poem "At the Erotic Bakery" where There are no cameras allowed.

Or discover with Peter Pereira as he reads the newspaper who had three wives, a lover/never married, lived alone, in his poem, "Reading the Obits."

We have a feeling this issue is going to sell out, so order your copies soon: www.crabcreekreview.org/subscrb.htm

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Also, we've begun our 2009 Poetry Contest and our judge this year will be Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of At the Drive-In Volcano (2007) and Miracle Fruit (2003). The Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize is $150 and publication in Crab Creek Review. All entries are considered for publication. For complete guidelines, please go to: www.crabcreekreview.org/contest.htm

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We are now on Facebook! Join our Crab Creek Review group and receive the latest news and updates.

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Thank you all for your support of our literary journal! We are glad to have you as readers and hope to bring you the best poems and short stories. And now we are accepting creative non-fiction essays for our next issue!For more details on our journal or how to submit your poems, stories, or creative non-fiction, please visit our website at: http://www.crabcreekreview.org/

Kelli Russell Agodon
Annette Spaulding-Convy
Editors