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April 9 2012

Greetings, friends in literature! 

 

Our 2012 Unified Literary Contest was by far the largest and strongest of any SLS contest, with over 1600 entries received from every corner of North America, Europe, and beyond. 

 

Congratulations to the winners, and all who entered! 

 

 
FICTION (judged by Mary Gaitskill)
First Place: Matthew Seidman (Brooklyn, NY)
Second Place: Steinur Bell (Sarasota, FL)
Third Place: Aggie Zivaljevic (San Jose, CA)

 

POETRY (judged by Tony Hoagland)
First Place: Dianne Seuss (Kalamazoo, MI)
Second Place: Christopher Robinson (Federal Way, WA)
Third Place: Dawn Marie Knopf (Portland, OR)
 
NON-FICTION (judged by Ander Monson)
First Place: Will Mackin (Rio Rancho, NM)
Second Place: James Kates (Fitzwilliam, NH)

Third Place: Jim Ruland (San Diego, CA)

  

The Center for Fiction Award (The Literarian) 

Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint (San Jose, CA)  

Runners-up: Stacy Hardy & Margaret Meklin

  

Graywolf Prize 

Snowden Wright (New York, NY)

Runners-up: Rachel Cantor, Diana Svennes-Smith,  Emma Smith-Stevens, & Laura Pritchett 

  

SLS-St. Petersburg Review Award 

Gabriel Tallent, Ashley Wren Collins, Justin Boening, & Cori A. Winrock

 

SLS Award for Emerging Writers

Karina Slobogian, Ottessa Moshfegh, & Eric Fershtman

 

Visit our contest page for all winner photos and bios. Over the next week or so, we will be sending out a number of merit-based fellowship offers to the contest participants whose work has impressed our readers and judges with its overall strength. 
 
Thank you again to our remarkable judges: Mary Gaitskill, Tony Hoagland, and Ander Monson, as well as our contest partners: The Walrus, Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM, The St. Petersburg Review, The Center for Fiction (The Literarian), Graywolf Press, Joyland, and  Branch 

 


 

 


Lithuania The Heart of Europe  

 lith 

LITHUANIA 2012: UPDATES ON OUR 20th PROGRAM
 
Now our focus turns to the SLS Lithuania Program, to take place July 15 - August 12. It marks our twentieth program in fourteen years of SLS history, and it promises to be one of the largest, most interesting and richly variegated ones, with its faculty comprised of some of the most interesting, prominent and innovative among the North American and international writers, poets, scholars, artists at work today.

 

One of the hallmarks of all SLS programs is the degree of its immersion in the culture and history of every place of its being -- and in Lithuania, the heart of Europe, the program will be cooperating with a large number of talented local writers, poets, editors, artists, photographers and scholars, as well. It is one of the SLS Lithuania program's goals to bring the new, heady, exciting intellectual, cultural, literary energy to a place of so much turbulent historical meaning. SLS Lithuania finds its meaning in contributing to the cause of restoring and preserving memory, re-establishing the lost cultural connections, and re-filling with meaning the empty spaces of bygone contexts. Vilnius, a city of striking beauty, is also a place of deep resonances, reverberating echoes, hidden pockets of emptiness. It is an exceptionally ruminative, pensive place -- not necessarily the right place for someone who gets bored easily in one's own solitary company  -- and SLS wants to share it with our faculty and participants. It is also a place of vigor and energy, a place in in slow, painful transition; a place of history, heartbreak and promise. SLS Lithuania 2012 will be a truly remarkable program.

 
Faculty and guests will include: Eileen Myles, Laimonas Briedis, Peter Cole, John Coy, Jonathan Garfinkel, Eric Goodman, Arielle Bernstein, Adina Hoffman, Ilya Kaminsky, Sergey Kanovich, Claudia Keelan, Kerry Shawn Keys, Fiona McCrae, Vitaly Komar, Sergei Gandlevsky, Rose Lehrer Cohen, Lara Lempert, Andrew Miksys, Ander Monson,  Quintan Ana Wikswo, Josip Novakovich, Dawn Raffel, Pierre Joris, Donald Revell, Steve Stern, Molly Antopol, Meg Wolitzer, plus some of the leading Lithuania and Eastern European scholars and artists and many more! 
 
 
Over the next week or so, we will be sending out a number of merit-based fellowship offers to the contest participants whose work has impressed our readers and judges with its overall strength. In the meantime, we invite all those interested in attending to apply sooner rather than later, as the program will likely fill up quite quickly.

 
In the next update, which will come at the very end of the month, we will announce the results of the SLS Photo Contest, will provide further updates on SLS Lithuania -- and we will announce the updated faculty lineup and will open the enrollment in our Kenya program, which this year again will coincide with the literary festival organized by the SLS partners, remarkable Nairobi-based Kwani? literary journal and trust.

 

Space is filling up for what should be the most interesting and and intense of all our programs, SLS Lithuania 2012: The Heart of Europe.   

 

Come join us for a unique literary and cultural journey -- SLS is like no other program in the world.

 

APPLY TODAY!

 

 


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