Madge McKeithen to Judge Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Competition
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CHARLOTTE—During an illustrious career spanning fifty-six years, reporter, feature writer, and columnist Rose Post won numerous state and national awards for her writing. Now, the contest that bears her name seeks to honor the best nonfiction writing by writers across North Carolina and beyond.
The Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Competition is now open. The deadline is January 15, 2019.
This year's contest will be administered by the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Queens University of Charlotte.
Sponsored by the North Carolina Writers' Network, the Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Competition is open to any writer who is a legal resident of North Carolina or a member of NCWN. Entries must be no more than 2,000 words.
The winner will receive $1,000 and possible publication of their winning entry in Ecotone.
The final judge is North Carolina native and Queens MFA graduate Madge McKeithen.
Growing up amid the white sand and tall pines of eastern North Carolina, Madge McKeithen headed to the College of William and Mary and then to Washington, DC, to graduate school at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
In 2001, the search for a diagnosis for her older son’s progressive degenerative illness led her to take a leave from full-time high school teaching and subsequently to begin writing seriously.
She studied in the Queens low-residency MFA program in Charlotte from 2003 to 2006, had her first book published in 2006, and that fall began teaching nonfiction writing at The New School in New York where she continues to teach nonfiction writing workshops.
Her first book, Blue Peninsula (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006), is a collection of essays that tell of her turn to poetry in the wake of her older son’s undiagnosed degenerative neurological illness. Since his death in 2016, she has been working on a collection related to his life.
Madge’s writing has been published in The New York Times Book Review, TriQuarterly, Utne Reader, Lost and Found: Stories from New York (Mr. Bellers Neighborhood Books, 2009), Best American Essays 2011, Lumina 2018, and in other journals, newspapers, and anthologies.
Madge blogs at www.madgemckeithen.com and tweets @MadgeMcKeithen.
The Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Competition encourages the creation of lasting nonfiction that is outside the realm of conventional journalism and has relevance to North Carolinians. Subjects may include traditional categories such as reviews, travel articles, profiles or interviews, place/history pieces, or culture criticism. The first-, second-, and third-place winners will receive $1,000, $300, and $200 respectively.
Designed to benefit committed writers who want to hone their craft without uprooting their lives, the Queens University of Charlotte MFA Program brings together experienced and emerging writers for intensive residencies and connects students and teachers online through the rest of the year as they work on their writing in the privacy and comfort of their own homes. With courses of study in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and writing for stage and screen, the MFA program offers a community of writers in-residence and online who share the immersive experience over four semesters of intense study and writing.
Queens faculty includes NCWN trustee Julie Funderburk; Pulitzer-nominated poet Morri Creech and fiction writer Jonathan Dee; Myla Goldberg; Judy Goldman; and more.
Learn more about the Queens MFA Program here.
Ecotone’s mission is to publish and promote the best place-based work being written today. Founded at the University of North Carolina Wilmington in 2005, the award-winning magazine features writing and art that reimagine place, and our authors interpret this charge expansively. An ecotone is a transition zone between two adjacent ecological communities, containing the characteristic species of each. It is therefore a place of danger or opportunity, a testing ground. The magazine explores the ecotones between landscapes, literary genres, scientific and artistic disciplines, modes of thought.
The full competition guidelines are listed below and can be found at www.ncwriters.org.
Eligibility and Guidelines
- The competition is open to any writer who is a legal resident of North Carolina or a member of the North Carolina Writers’ Network.
- The postmark deadline is January 15.
- The entry fee is $10 for NCWN members, $12 for nonmembers.
- Entries can be submitted in one of two ways:
- Send two printed copies through the U.S. Postal Service (see guidelines and address below), along with a check for the appropriate fee, made payable to the North Carolina Writers' Network.
- Submit an electronic copy online at http://ncwriters.submittable.com, and pay by VISA or MasterCard.
- Simultaneous submissions ok, but please notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
- Each entry must be an original and previously unpublished manuscript of no more than 2,000 words, typed in a 12-point standard font (i.e., Times New Roman) and double-spaced.
- Author's name should not appear on manuscripts. Instead, include a separate cover sheet with name, address, phone number, e-mail address, word count, and manuscript title. (If submitting online, do not include a cover sheet with your document; Submittable will collect and record your name and contact information.)
- An entry fee must accompany the manuscript. Multiple submissions are accepted, one manuscript per entry fee: $10 for NCWN members, $12 for nonmembers.
- You may pay the member entry fee if you join NCWN with your submission. Checks should be made payable to the North Carolina Writers’ Network.
- Entries will not be returned. Winners will be announced in March.
- If submitting by mail, send submission to:
The non-profit North Carolina Writers’ Network is the state’s oldest and largest literary arts services organization devoted to all writers at all stages of development. For additional information, visit www.ncwriters.org.
Please Take Our Member Website Survey
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WINSTON-SALEM—When the North Carolina Writers' Network first went virtual in 2008, it was a very different World Wide Web from what we find today.
The internet was flourishing, yes, but authors needed more help promoting their successes and finding news about the literary scene in North Carolina and beyond.
In the past ten years, we've gone from a brick 'n mortar office to one that exists only in cyberspace (unless we're at a conference, or sitting face-to-face with our members at a regional rep group event). We're even hosting online classes now, the first of which is now open for registration.
A lot has changed in the past decade.
NCWN is committed to a full redesign of our website very soon. Before we do this, though, we need to know how you, our members, use our current website.
We've created a short, ten-question survey. It won't take you even five minutes to complete. But it will let us know how you're using our website, how you'd like to use our website in the future, and what you need our website to be so that we can serve you for another ten, twenty, thirty years.
To start the survey, click here.
We know our current website looks a little outdated. We're gonna freshen it up. Let us know what you'd like to see, and we'll see if we can make it happen.
Thank you.