Tag: writing contests

New Visions extension announcement

- Stacy

As I was talking about yesterday, Hurricane Sandy has affected us at Lee & Low—our office is still currently without power—o we understand that it has made it hard especially for those in the path of the storm to get your New Visions entry into the mail. After all, in the middle of all this, a lot of us have more important things to worry about, like electricity and food. Subway and train service is also still a problem, which might be essential for someone trying to get to the post office, and I’m not sure if many affected post offices are back up and running yet.

In light of that, we’re announcing today that we’re going to grant a 2-week extension to the New Visions contest. Our new deadline is Nov. 14. Like the original deadline, that is a postmark deadline. As long as your entry is postmarked by Nov. 14, your entry has hit the deadline. We hope this extension particularly helps those in the path of the storm, but it applies across the board.

All the other guidelines remain in effect. The contest page will be updated when we are able to do so—can’t change it myself and those who can don’t have access right now.

Given that those who need this deadline most might not even have electricity right now, please share this far and wide and please retweet, Facebook, and share on your blogs and other social networks today and perhaps a few times later this week. Please get the word out. Thanks, and for those who are hardest hit by this storm, our thoughts are with you.

P.S. If you’re in another area and wondering how you can help with the hurricane, I’ve heard that they have had to cancel several local blood drives due to the infrastructure damage. If you can donate blood, that might be the best thing you can do, particularly because on the night of the storm they had to evacuate an entire hospital down at NYU. You might also consider donating money to the Red Cross.

Logistics of New Visions due to Hurricane Sandy

- Stacy 1 Comment

I have just weathered the hurricane in relative style—thankfully, my neighborhood came out relatively unscathed compared to other places. I still have power and internet (mostly, though some flickers), and I live on high ground. A friend and I just took a walk around the neighborhood, and the worst most of us got here were some downed trees and branches and some business canopies half-torn off. Down by the river, it’s still high, but thankfully in this neighborhood there’s not much down by the river except a park.

Further downtown it’s not such a bright tale, especially down by the waterfront here in Manhattan and in Brooklyn and Queens, and particularly over in New Jersey, which seemed to have gotten the brunt of it. From the press conference I just saw with Greg Christie, it’s going to be a while for New Jersey to really recover from this. The word “unprecedented” keeps coming up—this was a storm like no other on record in this area. It looked like a Cat 1, but the winds and the storm surge acted more like a Cat 3 or 4, from what I hear.

What that means for the New Visions contest, since I’ve gotten a lot of worried emails in the last couple of days from people worried about their entry either being received on time, or people in the path of the storm who haven’t been able to get out to mail their entries:

The deadline is a postmark deadline of Oct. 31, not a receipt deadline. So as long as you’re able to mail your entry by tomorrow, you’ll be fine.

However, particularly for those in the path of the storm, I understand that you’ve got a lot more on your mind right now than writing, and we don’t know when full services like the subway and the post offices will be back to normal. For today, I’m just going to encourage those of you who can to mail your entries by tomorrow. Tomorrow we’ll probably know a lot more about the assessments of damage and timelines and such, and I’ll know whether I can even get in to the office this week. So tomorrow once we know a little more, I’ll announce if we might be able to allow a small extension, particularly for those in the path of the storm, in the greater New York/New Jersey area particularly. I don’t know yet, but I wanted to reassure you that we understand and sympathize, as we’re dealing with this storm as well.

For now, if you can make it to the post office by tomorrow, just go ahead and send your entry that way. No need for any special delivery services like FedEx or UPS—in this situation, it will be *harder* for them because they don’t know when they’ll be able to get back into New York City, so from what I understand they’re not taking packages. The post office will go ahead and take your package, and they will deliver it when they can. As long as the postmark is Oct. 31 or earlier, you’re fine.

Thanks for your patience as we figure out what’s going on in the aftermath of this storm.

 

New Visions Award–deadline approaching!

- Stacy

I haven’t been blogging very consistently, I know—which made me only realize today that despite my many mentions of it on Twitter and Facebook, I haven’t yet talked about our New Visions Award here on the blog yet! With less than a month left before the deadline, I wanted to go a little into further detail about why we’re running this contest, and why you should share it far and wide with all your writer friends!

As you know, I focus on diversity in fantasy, science fiction, and mystery. We don’t require that our writers be people of color. Writing cross-culturally is perfectly valid—we’ve talked a lot here about how important it is to get a culture right if you’re writing cross-culturally, and to me, that’s what matters most when it comes to diversity in our books: that the books themselves reach beyond the status quo, and get it right while doing so.

But a vital part of getting it right is also welcoming voices from those communities we’re talking about, discovering new voices and adding them to the choral symphony. Look at CCBC’s 2011 numbers—the number of writers of color have mostly stagnated at roughly 6% of all books published, with roughly 8% of all books published featuring significant content about people of color (including formulaic non-fiction). Compare that with the population at large, which is roughly 25% PoC—or to the percentage of kids of color, our audience, which is fast approaching 50%—and you can see how stark those numbers really are, how bad we’ve been as an industry at offering “mirror” content to our readers and at sharing voices from their communities. If we were able to break it down into genres (does anyone have access to that kind of information? I’d love to see it), I have a feeling that YA SF and fantasy would have numbers that would look much worse.

So with that in mind, we started the New Visions Award, modeled after Lee & Low’s New Voices Award, to seek out new voices in genre fiction for young people. All the details can be found at our site (plus some awesome words about the contest from awesome people like Mitali Perkins and Nikki Grimes), but I’ll post a bit of it here so you can get an idea of what we’re looking for:

TU BOOKS, the fantasy, science fiction, and mystery imprint of LEE AND LOW BOOKS, award-winning publisher of children’s books, is pleased to announce the first annual New Visions Award. The award will be given for a middle grade or young adult fantasy, science fiction, or mystery novel by a writer of color. The Award winner receives a cash grant of $1000 and our standard publication contract, including our basic advance and royalties for a first time author. An Honor Award winner will receive a cash grant of $500.

TU BOOKS was launched in 2010, dedicated to diversity in the beloved genre fiction market for young people. Titles include Wolf Mark, Tankborn, and Cat Girl’s Day Off. This fall will bring the publication of Morris Award nominee and Pura Belpré Award winner Guadalupe Garcia McCall’s Summer of the Mariposas. For more information about TU BOOKS, visit leeandlow.com/p/tu.mhtml.

Eligibility:

  1. The contest is open to writers of color who are residents of the United States and who have not previously had a middle grade or young adult novel published.
  2. Writers who have published work in other venues such as children’s magazines or picture books, or adult fiction or nonfiction, are eligible. Only unagented submissions will be accepted.
  3. Work that has been published in its entirety in any format (including online and self publishing) is not eligible. Manuscripts previously submitted to TU BOOKS will not be considered.

Dates for Submission:

Submissions will be accepted from June 1, 2012, through October 31, 2012, and must be postmarked within that period.

Notice that the deadline is coming up at the end of this month!! So please share on Facebook and Twitter, share with your writing groups, share with your listservs—post it wherever it might be appropriate to share it around. Let your writer friends know! And if you, reading this right now, have a book that would be right for me, send it along!

I’d also add for those who aren’t new writers of color who want to submit a book to me, we’re always open to submissions from all writers, both agented and unagented, in our general submissions.