The 2017 Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Competition is now open for submissions. This contest awards $1,500 in prizes to a piece 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. The winning entry will be considered for publication by Ecotone.
For full guidelines, and to submit, click here.
The final judge is Garrard Conley, author of the memoir Boy Erased (Riverhead, 2016), featured in Buzzfeed, Travel + Leisure, the LA Times, and many other publications as a must-read book. Megan Daum of The New York Times calls Boy Erased a story written “through the lens…of compassion,” and Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, calls it an “exceptionally well-written memoir.” Conley’s fiction and nonfiction can be found in Time, Vice, CNN, Buzzfeed, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and Elizabeth Kostova Foundation writers’ conferences. He currently lives in Brooklyn.
The 2017 Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Competition is administered by the University of North Carolina at Wilmington Department of Creative Writing, a community of passionate, dedicated writers who believe that the creation of art is a pursuit valuable to self and culture. The contest is open to any writer who is a legal resident of North Carolina or a member of the North Carolina Writers’ Network. The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2017 (postmark).
The 2016 winner was Karen Smith Linehan of Carolina Beach, whose meditative nature essay “Magnolia grandiflora” displayed “solid sense of voice, language, and dramatic arc,” threading detailed memories into a lyrical read.
Rose Post worked for the Salisbury Post for fifty-six years as a reporter, feature writer, and columnist. She won numerous state and national awards for her writing and earned the N.C. Press Women’s top annual award four times. She received the O. Henry Award from the Associated Press three times, the Pete Ivey Award, and the School Bell Award for educational coverage. Nationally, she won the 1989 Ernie Pyle Award, the Scripps Howard Foundation National Journalism Award for human-interest writing, and the 1994 National Society of Newspaper Columnists’ Award.