Thursday, January 18, 2024

19th Annual Scissortail: The Poster


 

2024: Schedule of Readings

19th Annual: Scissortail Creative Writing Festival
April 4 - 6, 2024
East Central University
Ada, Oklahoma 

Thursday, April 4

I. 9:30 – 10: 45 Estep Auditorium 

Tina Carlson: Santa Fe, New Mexico
A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery
Walter Bargen: Ashland, Missouri
Down the Rabbit Hole of War
Mark Walling: East Central University
One Dalmatian 

II. 11:00 – 12: 10 Estep Auditorium

Nikki Herrin: Wayne, Oklahoma
Progression
Wendy Dunmeyer: Lawton, Oklahoma
Importance of Words
Alan Berecka: Sinton, Texas
Selected Poems 

III. 11:00 - 12:10 Regents Room

Clarence Wolfshohl: Fulton, Missouri
Lo, the Gods
Sally Rhoades: Albany, New York
When the Roses are in Bloom
Josh Grasso: East Central University
The Domovoi

IV. 11:00 – 12:10 Boswell Chapel

Lyman Grant: Harrisonburg, Virginia
November Constellation
Keely Record: Tulsa, Oklahoma
From Here
Brady Peterson: Belton, Texas
Letters from the Edge of the Round Earth 

*** Lunch ***

19th Annual Scissortail: Featured Authors

Kai Coggin
(she/her) is the inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Hot Springs, and author of four collections, most recently Mining for Stardust (FlowerSong Press 2021). She is a Certified Master Naturalist, a K-12 Teaching Artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council, an CATALYZE Grant Fellow with the Mid-America Arts Alliance, and host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—
Wednesday Night Poetry.

Recently awarded the Don Munro Leadership in the Arts Award, the 2021 Governor’s Arts Award, twice named “Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times, and nominated for Arkansas State Poet Laureate and Hot Springs Woman of the Year, her fierce and powerful poetry has been nominated six times for The Pushcart Prize, as well as Bettering American Poetry 2015, and Best of the Net 2016, 2018, 2021— awarded in 2022. Ten of Kai’s poems are going to the moon with the 
Lunar Codex project, and on earth they have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Prairie Schooner, Best of the Net, Cultural Weekly, SOLSTICE, Bellevue Literary Review, TAB, The Night Heron Barks, Sinister Wisdom, Lavender Review, Tupelo Press, and elsewhere. Coggin is Editor at large at SWWIM and is Associate Editor at The Rise Up Review. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. She lives with her wife and their two adorable Fu dogs in Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas.

Quraysh Ali Lansana is author of twenty books in poetry, nonfiction and children's literature. Lansana is currently a Tulsa Artist Fellow and a Visiting Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing at the University of Tulsa. He was formerly a Lecturer in Africana Studies at Oklahoma State University-Tulsa where he also served as Director of the Center for Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation. Lansana is Executive Producer of KOSU/NPR's "Focus: Black Oklahoma" monthly radio program, which is a recipient of a 2022 duPont-Columbia Award, a 2022 NAACP Image Award, a 2022 Oklahoma Society of Professional Journalists Award and was a Peabody nominee. Lansana is also the recipient of a 2022 Emmy Award, a 2022 Oklahoma Association of Broadcasters Award and a 2022 National Educational Telecommunications Association Public Media Award for his roles as host and consultant for the OETA (PBS) documentary film "Tulsa Race Massacre: 100 Years Later." Lansana is a three-time International Regional Magazine Award-winning Contributing Editor for Oklahoma Today magazine. A former faculty member of both the the Writing Program of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Drama Division of The Julliard School, Lansana served as Director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing at Chicago State University from 2002-2012 and was Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing there until 2014. His most recent books include, Opa's Greenwood Oasis, the skin of dreams; new and collected poems, 1994-2018, The Whiskey of Our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience & Change Agent, and The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop. Forthcoming titles include Killing the Negative: A Conversation in Art & Verse, with Joel Daniel Phillips, a children's biography of Ralph Ellison, and a series of books on The Black Rodeo. Lansana's work appears in Best American Poetry 2019. He is a founding member of Tri-City Collective and serves on the Board of Directors of the Philbrook Museum of Art and Oklahoma Humanities, is a Curatorial Scholar for The Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art and a Curatorial Board Co-Chair for the Ragdale Foundation. He is a Cave Canem Fellow and a member of the first cohort of the Culture of Health Leadership for Racial Healing Fellowship.

 

Steve Yarbrough is the author of twelve books, most recently the novel Stay Gone Days. His other books are the nonfiction title Bookmarked: Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, the novels The Unmade World, The Realm of Last Chances, Safe from the Neighbors, The End of California, Prisoners of War, Visible Spirits and The Oxygen Man, and the short story collections Veneer, Mississippi History and Family Men. His work has been published in several foreign languages, including Dutch, Italian, Japanese and Polish, and it has also appeared in Ireland, Canada, and the U.K. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the California Book Award, the Richard Wright Award and the Robert Penn Warren Award. He has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. The Unmade World won the 2019 Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction.

The son of Mississippi Delta cotton farmers, Steve is currently a professor in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College. He has two daughters – Lena Yarbrough and Antonina Parris – and is married to the Polish writer Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough.  They divide their time between Boston and Krakow.

Steve is an aficionado of jazz and bluegrass music, which he plays on guitar, mandolin and banjo, often after midnight.

2024: Scissortail Biographies

Aly Allen is a trans, neurodivergent poet, parent, and veteran. She is the author of Paying for Gas with Quarters (Middle West Press, 2023) and the chapbook Approaching Valhalla (Bottlecap Press, 2022). She has been an editor, reviewer, and reader for publications including: The Cimarron Review, Consequence, Glass Mountain, & Inkling. She founded the Military Memoirs Workshop (for veterans, servicemembers, and their families) and Edited the Military Memoirs Journal, featuring the work of a Vietnam veteran and their daughter. Her recent publications appear in: One Art Poetry, Panoply, new words (press), Press Pause, Consequence, New Note Poetry, and @ThreadsLitMag. She won the 2019 Lillie Robertson Prize for Poetry. She holds an MFA creative writing from Oklahoma State University, where she now teaches. Follow her on Threads and Instagram @notasquirrel

Dr. Rubeena Anjum is an educator and a psychologist. Now retired, she is one of the members of the Richardson Poets Group and Dallas Poets Community. Her work has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, The Bosphorus Review of Books, Artistic Antidote UMN Clinical Affairs, Corona Virus Anthology by Austin International Poetry Festival-2020, Art on the Trails: Mending 2021 Chapbook, Word City Literary Journal, Southwestern American Literature, and The Writer’s Garret-Common Language Project: Networks Anthology 2023, among others. Her full-length collection of poems by Finishing Line Press-2023 is titled My Photo Album.

Rilla Askew is the author of five novels, a book of stories, and a collection of creative nonfiction. She’s received the American Book Award, Western Heritage Award, Oklahoma Book Award, and Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her essays, poems, and short fiction have appeared in Nimrod, Tin House, World Literature Today, AGNI, and elsewhere. Askew’s novel Prize for the Fire, about Early Modern English writer Anne Askew, was a finalist for the 2023 Oklahoma Book Award. A new collection of stories, The Hungry & The Haunted, will be published by Belle Point Press in Fall 2024.

Wednesday, November 29, 2023

2024 Undergraduate Creative Writing Contest

Prizes: * 1st - $100 * 2nd - $75 * 3rd - $50
(Plus Books & Honorable Mentions)

Guidelines:

• Contest is open only to currently enrolled undergraduate students.

• Eligible students are expected to attend the Festival. Recognition will occur Friday evening, April 5, 2024. (Please do not submit if you cannot attend the festival).

• Submissions must be confirmed by a sponsoring faculty member.

• Each institution is allowed a maximum of 5 (five entries); This includes ECU.

• Each institution is responsible for selecting its contestants.

• Submissions are limited to one of three categories: 1) one piece of short fiction (up to 7500 words), or one piece of creative nonfiction (up to 7500 words), or up to three poems (150 lines total).

• Prizes will not be designated by genre, but will be awarded for best writing.

• All entries must be the original work of the student.

• All entries must be neatly typed; please double-space prose entries.

• Entries will not be returned, so keep your originals.

• No identifying marks should be on the manuscript itself, except for the title.

• Provide separate Cover page with contact information: 1) Student’s Name; 2) Student’s email address AND mailing address 3) Faculty Member’s Name & Email address 3) Institution 4) Classification 5) Phone number 6) Title of original work submitted

• Submit work by email to Dr. Joshua Grasso at jgrasso@ecok.edu. In the subject line of your email submission, type “Scissortail Undergraduate Contest.”

• Professor Grasso will screen entries, then an outside judge will judge all entries that meet minimum guidelines.

DEADLINE: Email entries to jgrasso@ecok.edu must be received by Midnight March 1, 2024. There will be no exceptions. Recognition of writers will occur Friday April 5 as part of the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival held at East Central University (April 4 - 6, 2024). Please regularly visit www.ecuscissortail.blogspot.com to view festival updates. Contact: Ken Hada, khada@ecok.edu (580) 559-5557 for information regarding the Festival

Judge: Denise Tolan is graduate of The Red Earth MFA at Oklahoma City University. Her work has been included in places such as The Best Small Fictions, The Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post, The Penn Review, Blue Mountain Review, Atlas and Alice, and Lunch Ticket. Her memoir, Italian Blood, was published by CavanKerry Press in October 2023.

Monday, October 9, 2023

20th Annual R. Darryl Fisher Creative Writing Contest

East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma presents 

Oklahoma’s Most Prestigious High School Writing Competition 

Fiction: 1st Place $250; 2nd place: $150; 3rd Place $100
Poetry: 1st Place $250; 2nd place: $150; 3rd Place $100
20 Honorable Mention Awards of $25 each

Guidelines:

* All Oklahoma high school students (9th - 12th grade) are eligible.

* Poetry (up to 100 lines) or Short Fiction (up to 6,000 words) is acceptable.

* Limit 5 poems and 1 short fiction piece per student.

* All entries must be the original work of the student.

* All entries must be neatly typed; please double-space fiction entries.

* Entries will not be returned, so keep your originals.

* No identifying marks should be on the manuscript itself, except for the title.

* Provide cover page with contact information: 1) Student’s name; 2) High School and Teacher’s name 3) Classification (senior, junior, etc.) 4) Phone number, Email and student’s mailing address. (Work submitted without a mailing address for each student will not be judged)

* Work may be submitted through conventional mail or email.

DEADLINE: Conventional mail must be postmarked on or before Friday, February 9, 2024. Email entries must be sent via email by 11:59 p.m. on February 9, 2024. There will be no exceptions. Winners will be notified and awards will be presented to students during the annual Scissortail Festival at ECU, April 8, 2023. The names of winning writers will be posted online at: www.ecuscissortail.blogspot.com.

Poetry Submissions: send work electronically as attached files to jgrasso@ecok.edu or mail to Dr. Joshua Grasso, East Central University, Dept. of English & Languages, 1100 E. 14th St.AdaOK 74820

Fiction Submissions: send work electronically as attached files to mwalling@ecok.edu or mail to Dr. Mark Walling, East Central University, Dept. of English and Languages, 1100 E. 14th St.AdaOK 74820

Contest Information: Dr. Joshua Grasso (580-235-3197); Dr. Mark Walling (580-559-5440).  Scissortail Creative Writing Festival Information: Dr. Ken Hada (580-559-5557) 

Friday, October 6, 2023

Tribute to Dr. Hugh Tribbey

With sadness, we acknowledge the passing of colleague and cofounder of the Scissortail Festival, Dr. Hugh Tribbey, October 5, 2023.

It was Dr. Tribbey’s original idea for ECU to host a writing festival; he wrote the first grant for the inaugural event, and secured our first feature author – Mark Cox.

Quoting from the obituary: “Dr. Tribbey was a brilliant individual with an exceptionally creative and gifted mind.” He earned his Bachelors of Arts degree from Philips University in Enid, Oklahoma. He earned a Master of Arts in Teaching from Oklahoma City University, a Master of Arts from Midwestern University in Wichita Falls, Texas, and a PhD from Oklahoma State University. He taught twenty years in the Department of English & Languages at East Central University. He was an accomplished poet, publishing nine books and hundreds of individual poems.