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Writers’ Conferences & Centers is conducting its annual competition to provide scholarships for emerging writers who wish to attend a writers’ conference, center, retreat, festival, or residency. The scholarships will be applied to fees to attend any of the members of WC&C, an association of outstanding conferences, colonies, and festivals for writers.
View a complete directory of WC&C Members
The competition is open to all writers who would like to attend a WC&C member program. To enter the competition, please follow the guidelines below. Two scholarships of $500 will be awarded.
2010 Judge:
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is the author of three books of poetry, The Gospel of Barbecue (Kent State University Press, 2000), winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize; Outlandish Blues (Wesleyan University Press, 2003); and Red Clay Suite (Southern Illinois University Press, 2007), second-prize winner of the Crab Orchard Open Competition. She has received an award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation; fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, The MacDowell Colony and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference; and the Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. Her poetry has appeared in several journals, including American Poetry Review, Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz and Literature, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares and Prairie Schooner; and in over a dozen anthologies, including Blues Poems (Everyman/Random House, 2003) and The Civil Rights Reader: American Literature from Jim Crow to Reconciliation(University of Georgia, 2009). A fiction writer as well, her stories have been published in Indiana Review, The New England Review, andStory Quarterly; her story collection was a finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize for fiction with Sarabande Press and she is the recipient of a Tennessee Williams fiction scholarship from the Sewanee Writers Conference. Honorée is a native southerner, but she now lives on the prairie where she is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma and teaches creative writing.
Guidelines for Submissions:
- Submissions in fiction and poetry will be considered. Separate submissions in each genre are permitted.
- Writers’ names must not appear on submissions. A separate cover sheet must accompany submissions and include the following: Name, Address, phone number, email address, title, and genre. Please bind submissions by staple, binder clip, or paper clip. If you wish to be notified that your manuscript was received please include an SASE postcard.
- All manuscripts must be single-sided and typed. Prose must be double-spaced. A maximum of one short story (or novel excerpt) up 25 pages or 10 pages of poetry will be considered. Each new poem must start a new page.
- You may enter in more than one genre, and you may also enter multiple manuscripts in one genre, provided each manuscript is accompanied by its own entry fee.
- Former or current students of the judge are ineligible. Previous recipients of WC&C Scholarships are also not eligible to submit.
Submissions must be postmarked between December 1st and March 30th of each year. Please address submissions to:
WC&C Scholarship Competition
Association of Writers & Writing Programs
MS1E3, George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
A $10 reading fee, either a check or money order in US dollars made payable to the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, must accompany all submissions. Winners will be notified by May 15th. All submissions should be accompanied by a SASE for notification of winners.
Two winners will receive $500 scholarships to attend a WC&C member program; funds are paid directly to the program selected. (Member conferences reserve the right to determine participants in their programs; winners select a first choice and two alternates.) Winners and finalists also receive a one-year individual membership in AWP.
2010 Scholarship Winners:
Poetry- Dilruba Ahmed is the author of Dhaka Dust (Graywolf, 2011), winner of the 2010 Bakeless Literary Prize for poetry, selected by Arthur Sze and awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Ahmed’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Cream City Review, New England Review, New Orleans Review, Drunken Boat, Pebble Lake Review and Indivisible: Contemporary South Asian American Poetry. Ahmed holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and lives near Philadelphia. Web site: www.dilrubaahmed.com. Fiction- Chidelia Edochie has been a winner of numerous awards in fiction, including the Joan Jakobson Award from the Wesleyan Writers Conference “awarded to writers of unusual promise.” She also has a passion for nonfiction, and is Editor of Creative Nonfiction for the renowned literary journal Sycamore Review. Chidelia lived and wrote in the southern Chinese city of Guǎngzhōu for almost 2 years, before returning to the US to attend a MFA Fiction program at Purdue University. She is currently at work on a novel about the black female experience in China. She is planning to attend the Wesleyan Writers Conference.
2009 Scholarship Winners:
Poetry- Celeste Doaks.
Fiction- Kelly Luce attended the Sewanee Writers Conference.
2008 Scholarship Winners:
Poetry- Christina Lovin attended the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.
Fiction- Jeffrey Voccola attended the Prague Summer Program hosted by Western Michigan University.
2007 Scholarship Winners:
Poetry- Ching-In Chen attended the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Workshop.
Fiction- Deirdra McAfee attended the Wesleyan Writers Conference.
2006 Scholarship Winners:
Poetry- Jocelyn Casey-Whiteman attended the Paris Writers' Workshop.
Fiction- Hosanna Patience attended the Tin House Writers' Conference.
2005 Scholarship Winners:
Poetry- Jillian Weise attended the Sewanee Writers Conference.
Fiction- Morgan McDermott.
2004 Scholarship Winners:
Poetry- J.W. Richardson attended the Santa Fe Writers’ Conference.
Fiction- Heidi Durrow attended the Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop.