Cash, working with master writers are benefits of writing competition

Cash and the chance to have professional writers read emerging authors’ work set apart the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards writing competition.

Working with a master author is a high point of book festival’s competition, said Meg Files, who heads the contest. The deadline for entries is 5 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 31.

There will be cash. The competition offers more than $5,000 in prize money across three categories: fiction, nonfiction and poetry.

In addition to taking home the money, first- through third-place winners in each category receive scholarships to the March 14-15 masters workshop at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. The workshop follows the Tucson Festival of Books, March 12-13 on the UA campus.

The top 50 entrants also are invited to attend the workshop, during which authors give “craft lectures” addressing creative writing technique, and the participants’ work is read and critiqued by a master author and a group of nine peers.

About a third of the contest winners have been from Tucson and Southern Arizona, said Files, who is chair of the Pima Community College English and journalism department.

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Luke Tennis, the 2014 winner in the fiction category, notes in an article on the festival website that in addition to helpful critiques, his favorite part of the masters workshop was “meeting other writers and remaining in contact with some of them.”

Emelia Reuterfors, who won the 2014 poetry category for “Anti-Kill and Other Poems,” said in the festival-site piece that her favorite part of the workshop was listening to faculty member and poet Rae Armantrout talk about “her own fascinations of double meaning and of Freud’s perspective of the ‘uncanny.’”

The contest and workshop were added to the festival to expand its focus, adding an emphasis on writing as well as reading, and bringing prestige to the festival, said Files when the competition and workshop launched in 2013.

Past workshop faculty members have included Kevin Canty, Chitra Divakaruni, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Ann Hood, Marilyn Nelson, Bill Roorbach and Larry Watson.

The entry fee is $20 per submission. For more information and to submit an entry go to TucsonFestivalofBooks.org