Christopher Hewitt Award Contest 2015

Call for Entries: Christopher Hewitt Award 2015

No-fee contest for Fiction/Poetry/Drama/Nonfiction relating to HIV/AIDS

Deadline: September 1, 2015

A&U Magazine is currently accepting entries for the third annual Christopher Hewitt Award. An award will be given in each of four categories: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Creative Nonfiction. Past winners and runners-up have included Stephen S. Mills, Diane Seuss, and Nick Hadikwa Mwaluko.

The winner in each genre will receive a $50 prize and will have his or her work featured in A&U’s annual Summer Reading Issue. Winners will be selected by our editors. If any genre lacks a clear winner, fewer than four awards may be given. All entries will be considered for publication.

A&U: America’s AIDS Magaine, a national print and online magazine now in its 24th year, regularly features cover-story interviews with writers and public figures such as Tony Kushner, John Waters, Emanuel Xavier, Janet Jackson, Anjelica Houston, and George Takei.

“It was clear to our judges that what makes great contemporary writing about HIV/AIDS stand out from the crowd is just that: It’s contemporary. It feels fresh and vital, willfully undermining our old stories about illness and reflecting instead a complex global reality, in which diagnosis doesn’t have to equal tragedy and finding a cure turns out not to be a simple victory.”—A&U’s Literary Editor on last year’s Hewitt Award

Guidelines:

• All submissions must be related directly or indirectly to HIV/AIDS, including but not limited to personal, historical, critical, international, and political perspectives on HIV/AIDS—and in styles ranging from sonnets to science fiction.

• Poetry can be any length/style; Fiction, Drama, and Creative Nonfiction (includes essays/memoirs) should be no longer than 1,200 words. Excerpts from longer works are accepted. All entries must be previously unpublished.

• Email submissions as Word or PDF attachments to aumaglit [at] gmail [dot] com. In the subject heading of your email, include Your Name, the Genre, and the word “Award.” For example: “Chris Smith, Nonfiction, Award.” Do NOT include your name on the manuscript itself.

• Multiple submissions are accepted; please send a separate email for each submission.

The deadline is September 1, 2015. There is no entry fee.

About Christopher Hewitt:

A native of Worcestershire, Christopher Hewitt emigrated from England to the United States in 1974. He received an undergraduate degree from the University of Birmingham in England in 1971 and went on to earn master’s degrees in English and creative writing from UC Davis and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop at University of Iowa. Over the course of his career as a writer, he published poems and translations in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Advocate, The James White Review, and BENT, among others. His work was also anthologized in Queer Crips: Disabled Gay Men Tell Their Stories. At the time of his death, he was working on a memoir titled “Brittle Bones,” in part about living with osteogenesis imperfecta. He taught writing at the University of San Francisco, Fordham University, and John Jay College of Criminal Justice, among others. Chris helped inaugurate A&U’s premiere issue and filled several editorial posts at the magazine, including Literary Editor, until his death in 2004 at the age of fifty-eight.