WNBA 2018 Annual Writing Contest
Now accepting submissions through March 1, 2018
Fiction | Creative Non-fiction/ Memoir | Poetry | YA Fiction
$250 cash prizes for the winner in each category and publication in The Bookwoman.
Categories and Judges
Poetry
Carol Smallwood will judge the poetry submissions. One of Carol Smallwood’s over five dozen anthologies, Women on Poetry: Tips on writing, revising, publishing and teaching, is on Poets & Writers Magazine’s List of Best Books for writers. Her latest is Library Outreach to Writers and Poets: Interviews and case studies of cooperation (McFarland, 2017). A multiple Pushcart nominee, she has served as reader, reviewer, interviewer, and judge and has received various recognitions such as a National Federation of State Poetry Societies Award.
Fiction
Regina Marler will judge the fiction submissions. After editing Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, Ms. Marler wrote Bloomsbury Pie: The Making of the Bloomsbury Boom, and edited Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America on to Sex. Her fiction has appeared in North American Review, Carolina Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has contributed to the Los Angeles Times, the New York Observer, Amazon.com, and the Advocate and currently contributes to the New York Times Book Review, the TLS, and the Signet Classics series. Recent essays include the Cambridge Companion to Bloomsbury, Queer Bloomsbury, and forthcoming: Oxford Guide to Virginia Woolf.
Nonfiction
Katie Hafner will judge the nonfiction submissions. She has been writing for The New York Times since 1991. She has also written for The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Wired, The New Republic, and O, the Oprah Magazine. Her books include Cyberpunk: Outlaws and hackers on the computer frontier (with John Markoff), Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The origins of the internet (with Matthew Lyon), and others. Her most recent book Mother Daughter Me, a memoir about multigenerational living, was published in 2013 by Random House.
YA Fiction
Tanya Egan Gibson will judge the Young Adult fiction submissions. Her debut novel, How to Buy A Love of Reading, was published by Dutton in May 2009. An alumna of Squaw Valley Community of Writers, she is mother to a four-year-old who produces countless construction paper “books” that she insists Mommy “get published” and an infant whose favorite teether is HTBALOR, and wife to the most patient man in the universe.
For contest requirements, fees, and submission information, please go to: https://wnba.submittable.com/submit
Flyer with all the information: WNBA contest flyer
Vicki DeArmon works as the Events & Marketing Director for Copperfield’s Books in San Francisco’s North Bay, booking authors for events. In the wee hours, she writes. Her passion is reading and writing fiction. Right now she’s working on a collection of short stories, She Let Go Their Hands, depicting families riding the roller coaster of addiction. Her story from this collection entitled “Hydroplaning” placed second in the 2015 Women’s National Book Association annual writing contest for Fiction. And there’s a comic novel brewing called Tilting: The Nearly True Story of a Small Book Publishing Empire that draws from the years she spent running Foghorn Press in San Francisco in the 1990s. This year, she’s been honored to read at Litquake, to attend Lit Camp 2015 and to be chosen as one of a cast of 13 selected to read pieces at this year’s Listen to Your Mother event in San Francisco. Her blog (
Renate Stendhal, Ph.D. is the author of the award-winning photobiography “Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures” (Algonquin, 1994). She is a German-born, Paris-educated writer and writing coach in the San Francisco Bay Area. In Paris, she worked as a cultural correspondent and translated works by Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Rich, Susan Griffin, Audre Lorde et al into German. Her multimedia show “In the Beginning…of the End,” toured throughout Europe in the ‘80s and was produced as an award-winning film by the Canadian Film Board. Her essays appeared in many international magazines. Among her publications are “Lesbian Marriage: A Love & Sex Forever Kit” (New Leaf, 2014, www.lesbianloveforever.com), co-authored with her life companion Kim Chernin, and “True Secrets of Lesbian Desire” (North Atlantic, 2003). Her memoir entitled “Kiss me Again. She Did.” placed second in the 2015 Women’s National Book Association annual writing contest for Creative Non-Fiction. Renate also works in private practice as a relationship expert and coach for couples and individuals. Her Gertrude Stein blog “Why Do Something If It Can Be Done” is at 
