Linda Flowers Literary Award

Linda Flowers Literary AwardPrize: $1,500 & Writers Residency Stipend
Deadline: June 16, 2017
Email: nchc@nchumanities.org
Website: http://www.nchumanities.org/content/linda-flowers-literary-award

Description

The North Carolina Humanities Council invites original, unpublished entries of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry for the Linda Flowers Literary Award. Submissions should detail examinations of intimate, provocative, and inspiring portraiture of North Carolina, its people and cultures, bringing to light real men and women having to make their way in the face of change, loss, triumph, and disappointments.

Guidelines

  • Entries must be deeply and palpably engaged with some aspect of North Carolina, must draw on particular North Carolina connections and/or memories, and profoundly celebrate excellence in the humanities.
  • Authors must be at least 18 years of age and live in North Carolina
  • Entries, regardless of genre, should be original, unpublished works of 3 to 10 pages. Entries that fall outside these length stipulations will be disqualified.
  • All entries should be typed in a standard 12 point font.
    • Prose should be double-spaced.
    • Poetry, whether a suite of poems or one long poem, should be single spaced.
    • If you submit an excerpt from a larger work, include within the 10-page maximum a one-page synopsis of the work as a whole.
  • The author’s name should not appear anywhere on the submis­sion.
  • Only one entry per writer will be accepted.
  • Submissions will only be accepted electronically from March 10, 2017 – June 16, 2017.  Submission instructions and link will be provided at the opening of the cycle.

Submission Instructions

  • Submissions will only be accepted electronically from March 10, 2017 – June 16, 2017
  • Submit original, unpublished work as a Microsoft Word document (the author’s name should not appear anywhere on the submis­sion)
  • Email your submission to lfsubmission@nchumanities.org 
  • Please include the following information in the body of the email:
    • Author’s full name
    • Institutional Affiliation (if any)
    • Telephone number
    • Email address
    • Mailing address
    • Title of the submission(s)

Incomplete submissions and entries that fall outside these guidelines and submission instructions will be disqualified.

Selection Process

A panel of judges will select the Linda Flowers Literary Award winner.

Timeline

Submission deadline:  June 16, 2017

Winner announced: November 3 – 5, 2017 at the North Carolina Writers Network Fall Conference in Wrightsville Beach.

Recipient

The winner of The Linda Flowers Literary Award will receive a cash prize of $1,500 and a stipend for a writer’s residency at Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities in Southern Pines, North Carolina.

About the Award

The North Carolina Humanities Council was privileged to have Linda Flowers as one of our trustees from 1992 to1998. During the years we shared with her, she taught us many things. Above all, Linda showed us what it means to live by one’s belief that “the humanistic apprehension is as necessary for living fully as anything else… [it must ] be recognize[d] and nurture[d]… to realize more fully the potential of the human spirit.”
In addition to honoring Linda Flowers (1944–2000) with an award named for her, the Humanities Council seeks to draw to the attention of others something special that Linda passed on to us. We want to celebrate excellence in the humanities achieved by people like her, those who not only identify with our state, but who explore the promises, the problems, the experiences, the meanings, in lives that have been shaped by North Carolina and its many cultures.

Linda Flowers was somewhat surprised by the strong connections readers made to her book Throwed Away: Failures of Progress in Eastern North Carolina in 1990. She believed they were responses to “the book’s humanistic dimension: the focus on real men and women having to make their way in the face of a changing, onrushing and typically uncaring world.” This is true to the portraits in Throwed Away; it is just as true of “I Have Come Home,” the essay Linda wrote about her experience with cancer for NC Crossroads (May 1999). Both are superb examinations of intimate, provocative, inspiring portraiture of North Carolina, its people and cultures. The Linda Flowers Literary Award is intended for a literary work that demonstrates these powers of recognition.

Previous Linda Flowers Award Recipients:

Please note: No winner was selected for the 2015 Linda Flowers Literary Award.