Two contests from The New Quarterly: for poetry & for personal essays

The New Quarterly
c/o St. Jerome's University
290 Westmount Road North
Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G3
http://www.tnq.ca/

The Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest
This contest is for poems written in response to an occasion, personal or public - poems of gratitude or grief, poems that celebrate or berate, poems that make of something an occasion or simply mark one.

We will award a grand prize of $1,000 to the poem judged most worthy. Another $1,000 in prize money will be distributed as the judges fancy. However the prize money falls, the best of what we see will be published in The New Quarterly, at our usual rates, and posted on our website.

Entry fee: $40 for up to 2 unpublished poems, $5 each for additional poems. Submissions include a one-year Canadian subscription (or subscription extension) to The New Quarterly, and may be accompanied by a brief paragraph describing the event that occasioned the poem. Entrants must be Canadian or currently residing in Canada.  Deadline: Feb 28, 2011

The Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest

We are interested in essays of any length, on any topic, in which the writer's personal engagement with the topic provides the frame or through-line. Our only restrictions are that the work be previously unpublished and the writer Canadian.

We offer a $1,000 prize for the winning essay; all submissions will be considered for paid publication in the magazine.  Entry fee: $40 per submission. Each submission includes a one-year Canadian subscription (or subscription extension) to The New Quarterly.  Deadline: March 28, 2011

Full rules for both contests and entry instructions here: http://tnq.ca/contests

For regular submissions, The New Quarterly pays $250 for a short story and $40 per poem or "postscript" story. Full submission guidelines here.

To keep up to date with all the annual writing contests in Canada, get the 2011 Canadian Writers' Contest Calendar – just $23 including tax and shipping (or $20 at any of Brian Henry's workshops or classes). To order your copy, email brianhenry@sympatico.ca. More details here.

For information about Brian's writing workshops and creative writing courses, see here.