Carrie McCray Contest

By Brenda Remmes

We will begin accepting submissions for the Carrie McCray Contests on May 1, 2011. For specifics on submission requirements, go to the SCWW website, http://www.myscww.org and click on the Contests sidebar. Keep in mind that you must be attending the SCWW 2011 conference to enter the contest. At the close of the contest, we will cross reference your entry with registrations for the conference before submitting it to the judges.

All submissions are a blind entry: no names are included on the pages. As in the past, none of the judges are Board Members of SCWW. In fact, most of the judges aren’t even members of SCWW.

Submissions are accepted in four categories: Poetry, Short non-Fiction, Short Fiction, and First Chapter Novels. Poetry is to be no more than forty lines and a limit of 4,000 words apply to the other three categories. Further details are on the web site.

We have almost completed selecting our judges for this competition. Their names and backgrounds will be forthcoming. Each judge is either a published author, an editor, or a teacher of creative writing at the college level. There will be three judges for each category who will score each entry based on a 30 point scale: 10 points for CONTENT (originality and creativity), 10 points for STRUCTURE (grammar and mechanics), and 10 points for STYLE (sentence cohesion, story arc, aesthetics success). The scores from the three judges will be added to determine the winner.

We encourage conference attendees to take advantage of this contest. There is a $200 first prize and a $100 second prize in each category. Winners will be announced at the conference.