CRWROPPS Post: 2nd Annual Mary Blinn Poetry Prize

Quick Links After Hours Website Poetry Award Guidelines  Order After Hours Online Marty McConnell transplanted herself from Chicago to New York City in 1999, after completing the first of three national tours with The Morrigan, an all-female performance poetry troupe.  She received her MFA in creative writing/poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and for nearly a decade, co-curated the flagship reading series of the New York City-based louderARTS Project. She returned to Chicago in 2009 to launch Vox Ferus, an organization dedicated to empowering and energizing individuals and communities through the written and spoken word.    Part of the vanguard of poets fusing and refusing and queering the delineations between literary and oral poetry, McConnell's work blurs the lines between autobiography and personae to illuminate what it means to live and love outside the lines in 21st century America.    McConnell's second poetry collection, when they say you can't go home again, what they mean is you were never there, won the 2017 Michael Waters Poetry Prize.  Her first nonfiction book, Gathering Voices: Creating a Community-Based Poetry Workshop, was recently published by YesYes Books.     She is the author of wine for a shotgun, (EM Press), which received the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Awards, and was a finalist for both the Audre Lorde Award (Publishing Triangle) and the Lambda Literary Awards. She is also a seven-time National Poetry Slam team member, the 2012 National Underground Poetry Individual Competition (NUPIC) Champion, and appeared twice on HBO's "Def Poetry Jam."   Marty McConnell was the featured writer in After Hours #36, Summer 2018. Your Editors Albert DeGenova Pat Hertel After Hours  Announces The 2nd Annual MARY BLINN POETRY PRIZE with 2020 Judge Marty McConnell ENTER by Feb 28, 2020 $200 First Prize, Three $50 Finalists click here for guidelines       After Hours is excited to invite you to enter the Second Annual Mary Blinn Annual Poetry Prize. Commemorating the outstanding work of Mary Blinn as a poet, visual artist and musician, this prize is awarded annually for outstanding works of poetry by writers who, like Mary Blinn, are deeply dedicated and passionate about their art and the crafting of fine poetry. One $200 Winner and three $50 Finalists will be chosen. Preliminary selections will be made in an anonymous review by After Hours editors, with the final winning poems chosen (also anonymously) by our 2020 Judge Marty McConnell.  Winning entries will be published annually in the Summer Issue of After Hours. Deadline for entries is February 28, 2020. Unlike our standard submission guidelines which require contributors to have a connection to metro Chicago, the Mary Blinn Poetry Prize is open to all poets writing in English. The competition is open to all themes, styles and forms of poetry. We simply ask poets to submit their best unpublished work, because we want our prize winning poems to be high quality, eclectic and emotionally charged. After Hours has published two-issues per year consistently since June of 2000. We are wholly independent without any outside source of funding. We value our independence and want to continue without influence or oversight. As is common with many literary journals who sponsor prizes and competitions, we will require an entry fee for this competition. Your $15 entry fee will primarily fund our prizes but will also help to support the cost of publishing, postage and the overall long-term future of After Hours. We do hope you will enter the Mary Blinn Poetry Prize competition and/or recommend us to your favorite poets. There's nothing more exciting, as an editor, than clicking on the next poem, which might be the winner. About Mary Blinn Mary wrote poetry throughout her life, but took up the craft in earnest in the 1990s, winning a prize with one of her earliest efforts, "His Treasure" in 1993. More than a poet, however, Mary was also a singer/songwriter and visual artist. Her CD of children's songs, "A Handful of Sunshine," which she wrote and performed, earned a Grammy nomination in 2002. She had numerous art exhibits and installations at galleries around Chicago, including a one-woman show at the Old Town Triangle gallery in 2013, and an open-air multimedia installation called "I See Faces" in Oak Park, IL. Mary was highly regarded within the Chicago poetry scene. She was a regular contributor to After Hours and frequently read her works at various area Open Mics and invitational readings, including the Printer's Row Literary Fest. She also received an Illinois State Poetry Award and a Pushcart Prize nomination. Mary earned her master's degree in interdisciplinary arts from Columbia College, Chicago, where she worked in the music department, and taught a freshman class in critical thinking. When she was suddenly faced with a devastating illness, her reaction was to start a project to make a multimedia book about her hospitalization -- something to help other people who might share the same situation. Taking a bad experience and turning it into something creative to help other people is quintessential Mary. Unfortunately she wasn't able to complete that project; but in recognition of her talent and many other contributions to the poetry community, After Hours has published her selected poems   "when word and image run away." Click here for contest guidelines.

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