It’s our fight club, sort of, with two $500 winners.
We’ll award top prizes to an essayist and a poet for their fighting words.
We suspect we’ll get submissions on boxing, wrestling, maybe something recalling the joke about the hockey game breaking out at the professional bout. But we’ll leave the interpretation of fighting to you.
Here are the rules. Poets can send up to three poems for the $30 reading fee. Be sure to put all poems in one Word document. The editors will read and send anonymous finalists (probably up to a dozen) to Frank Van Zant, our contest judge. Frank simply picks his favorite. Writers can send a single essay for the same $30 reading fee, or enter as many times as you like for more $30 reading fees. Please limit the word count on essays to 2,500 words. Todd Davis, one of our most recent contest winners, will be the guest judge for the essays. Smart money suggests reading his essay, “Lessons.” Then send us your own knockout prose. Previously published work is okay. Just let us know when and where, so we can give credit in our pub.
Your $30 entry fee helps build the pot and gets you a two-issue subscription to Sport Literate, which will begin with our “Fallout 2018” issue and follow with the forthcoming spring 2019 issue.
All entries should come through the Submittable tool on our website. All submissions will be considered for future publications. We reserve the right to extend the contest, or cancel it because a lack of entrants. If we should cancel, we’ll return any $30 entry fees.
Set your calendar for Groundhog Day, also James Dickey’s birthday, and (final pun) hit us with your best shot by February 2, 2019.
Frank Van Zant, the longtime poetry editor of Sport Literate, is now our resident contest judge. He has published more than 400 poems in numerous literary journals, and is the author of two books of poetry: Climbing Daddy Mountain and The Lives of the Two Headed Baseball Siren. Frank is director of one of the oldest alternative schools in the country, The Greenhouse, in Rockville Centre, New York.
Todd Davis is the author of five full-length collections of poetry — Winterkill; In the Kingdom of the Ditch; The Least of These; Some Heaven; and Ripe — as well as of a limited-edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow. He edited the nonfiction collection, Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball, and co-edited the anthology Making Poems. His writing has won the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Bronze and Silver Awards, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, and has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. His poems appear in such noted journals and magazines as Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Missouri Review, North American Review, Orion, Poetry Northwest, Sycamore Review, West Branch, and Poetry Daily. He teaches environmental studies, creative writing, and American literature at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.
*Note: Due to postal costs, subscriptions can be sent to U.S. domestic addresses only. If you’re living abroad, we’re happy to send it to a cousin here.