Lazuli Literary Group Writing Contest

Fall 2021

$500 Prize + publication

Now accepting submissions! See guidelines and submission info below.

We love work that is linguistically, intellectually, and emotionally demanding of the reader. We want art that grows in complexity upon each visitation; we enjoy ornate, cerebral, and voluptuous phrases executed with thematic intent. Some writers whose work we admire are Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Jorge Luis Borges, Charles Dickens, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Robert Musil, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Milton, Aphra Behn, Herman Melville, and Italo Calvino.

Read more about our aesthetic inclinations here.

GUIDELINES

Deadline: Oct 21, 2021 (11:59pm EST)
Submission fee: $15

AESTHETICS:

Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essays, philosophical ruminations, experimental pieces, stage plays, fragments, and excerpts are all acceptable. We are not concerned with genre distinctions—send us the best you have; we want only for it to be thoughtful, intelligent, and beautiful. All writers tend to develop a scrap heap of brilliant writing - sharp dialogue that has been cut in service of a plot, a philosophical tirade that can't quite be couched in a narrative, a stunning imagistic landscape of linguistic pyrotechnics that deserves an audience... Literary beauty exists in more than the conventional narrative, we believe, and the most cerebral moments cannot necessarily be expressed in more than bursts and fragments. We would love to provide a space for those portions of works that have been cut away through no fault of their own.

SUBMISSIONS

You may submit multiple pieces as long as each is accompanied by a separate entry fee. One poetry submission may include up to 5 unrelated (or related) poems.
Page limit for any type of submission: 150 pages.
The winning entry will be published online in AZURE: A Journal of Literary Thought. An excerpt from this piece will appear on the contest page.
We will give as many first place prizes as the top submissions warrant--that is, if multiple pieces strike us as first place winners, each winner will receive $500. Happenstance has nothing to do with quality.

ELIGIBILITY

Both previously published and unpublished works are eligible, provided that potential publication in AZURE: A Journal of Literary Thought does not infringe on previously held rights.
Simultaneous submissions are fine, even encouraged--your work deserves its due! If your work is published elsewhere before the end of our judging period, you are still eligible for the prize money, so you may choose to leave your work under consideration provided that you will allow us to publish a short excerpt from your piece on our website (we are also happy to link to the publication where the entire work can be found).
While works previously published in AZURE: A Journal of Literary Thought are not eligible, an author whose work we have previously published may submit a new work for consideration.
If you have previously been the winner of a Lazuli Literary Group Writing Contest, you are not eligible to submit.

JUDGING

All submissions are read blind (without knowledge of the author's name or background information).
The winning submission(s) will be selected by Sakina B. Fakhri, the editor of AZURE: A Journal of Literary Thought.
A cover letter is not required and will not affect the success of your submission, but please include a short bio that we can use in the event of publication.

DISCOUNTED COPIES OF AZURE FOR ENTRANTS

With thanks for your participation in the contest, we offer discounted print copies of "AZURE: A Journal of Literary Thought," to be found on the contest checkout page on Submittable. If you are placing an order, please include your FULL shipping address in your contact form. Also, please note that we are currently only able to ship within the U.S. and Canada. If you live outside the U.S. and would like to order a copy of AZURE, you may order through Amazon (Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, or Volume 4), or, if funds and location make it possible for you (in support of indie bookstores en masse), through our affiliate page at Bookshop.org.

WE WILL DONATE 20% OF YOUR CONTEST FEE...

... to a different charitable organization for each contest. We believe that part of the reason we create literature and cultivate expression is to create a better world--for each contest, we will aim to highlight and contribute to an organization that does just that.

For the Fall 2021 Writing Contest, 20% of your contest fee will go to Border Angels:

From the Border Angels website:

"We are a non-profit organization that is dependent on volunteers. We advocate for human rights, humane immigration reform, and social justice. This work is done in an attempt to reduce the number of fatalities along the US-Mexico border by educating and assisting the communities on both sides of the border. Services include free immigration and employee rights consultation, educational programs, water drops in the desert, day labor outreach, and Caravans of Love to Tijuana to support and aid migrants that are in need."

If you would like to apprise us of an endeavor close to your heart that would benefit from writers' donations, please reach out to us through the contact form and we will consider it for our next contest.

submit to contest

To send a non-contest general submission for publication in AZURE: A Journal of Literary Thought, please visit our submissions page.

PAST WINNERS

Winter 2021 Writing Contest: Winner

Congratulations to Veronica Tang, winner of the Lazuli Literary Group 2021 Writing Contest for "Micromorts"! The full story will appear online in Vol. 5, Issue 3 of "AZURE: A Journal of Literary Thought." For now, here's a glance at the work:

[Obligatory spoiler alert for those unfamiliar with the plot points of 'Peter Pan' who wish to remain so]

But because micromorts are a mathematically defined unit, zero does, in fact, exist. The micromorts of any given activity is calculated by taking the number of deaths due to said activity, dividing by the population in question, and multiplying by one million. Therefore, if any one activity has never killed a single member of the population, say, stubbing a toe, the micromorts of that activity is 0.

By that argument then, the risks of taking LSD and dying from a papercut are equivalent. Am I the only one who thinks that is stupid? Even better, they are both equal to zero.

...

But though the risk of dying for the modern human is remarkably small, death will come for each and every one of us eventually. Will she come as the Morrígan, phantom queen of the Irish Ulster Cycle, covered head to toe in the feathers of a crow? Until then, we entertain ourselves with illusions, foolishly believing that by hurtling through the air or by balancing on metal blades, we can challenge death itself.

Peter held the arrow that felled Wendy in his hand. “She is dead,” he said uncomfortably. “Perhaps she is frightened at being dead.” I’d like to think that, for a moment, Tinker Bell might have felt a twinge of regret. But J.M. Barrie knows best, and according to him, “fairies have to be one thing or the other, because being so small they unfortunately have room for only one feeling at a time.”

Victory, then. Just victory, intertwined with death inside the fairy’s mind.

**For the Winter 2021 season, we donated 20% of all contest fees to the Navajo Water Project, a charitable organization that provides running water to tribal communities: "The Navajo Water Project is Indigenous-led, and registered as an official enterprise on the Navajo Nation. Our work creates meaningful, high-paying jobs, many with benefits like 100% employer-paid health coverage."

Summer 2020 Writing Contest: Winners

Congratulations to the authors of the following two pieces of fiction, both of which have been awarded the first place prize in our summer writing contest! Both pieces are forthcoming in Volume 5, Issue 2 of AZURE.

Frank Meola's multi-layered piece, The Looking Glass of Arthur Gordon Pym, comically and meaningfully reveals the perils of narrator bias and the illuminating fictions of history. The piece proceeds carefully in Poe-reminiscent prose:

Furthermore, over the next several weeks the book began to sell (modestly) and was received by reviewers and public alike as entirely the work of Edgar Allan Poe, based on the factual account related to him by me--that is, by Arthur Pym. My dismay at this turn of events, my feelings of betrayal and usurpation, were nothing compared to a far more powerful feeling: that of obliteration. This was my text, this text was my life, and now it was another man's text and life--no, worse, I was now the invention of this other person. I was, in effect, dead. One could say murdered. For I discovered (too late, not having read the final proofs or the finished book with all its emendations) that Poe had added a long note after the narrative's last page, the page on which I describe the "shrouded human figure," enormous and white, that rose up before us as our boat plunged into what seemed to be a giant cataract. The note began thus: "The circumstances connected with the late sudden and distressing death of Mr. Pym was already well known to the public through the medium of the daily press."

Sudden death! Well known! Imagine my horror at reading these fraudulent words. What could have been Poe's motive in writing them? I was (I am) quite alive and well, despite the nervous condition brought on by my terrible ordeals. I immediately sought out Poe and found him in another dreary, dank pub, inebriated but entirely capable of reasoned discourse. He explained--as we shared a drink--that this postscript was another ruse: my putative death would serve to reinforce the truth of my existence. His slight Southern inflections lent an ironic melancholy to his words as he regarded me closely with that intense, haunted yet mischievous gaze. I stared back, suddenly dizzy from the combination of drink and bizarre paradox. I found myself drawn into those bleary-sharp eyes, almost as if I were falling, body and mind, into their depths.

Our second winner is Kirk Marshall, whose stand-alone chapter entitled "Wolf Tickets Through the Feral Winter" will be the second excerpt of his forthcoming novel Feverglades to be published in AZURE. He weaves a delicate beauty in a bleak landscape--there is a touch of the gentle grotesque in this piece, which seethes with empathy:

The dogs were muscling their gaunt shapely forms from out of blind snow-bracketed banks, lanes, ditches, Detroit’s steel-girdered interstices — the inglenooks and modesties of Dearborn, slender brown skulk like clats of sinister inchworms on the eye. Their bellies cinched in dry lank starvation. Their ears and snouts and coats kinked wet, glossed, obtaining an august diesel sheen in the glaucous boreal light, blue kidney figments as though migrant dolphins come ashore on roaming silver-haired legs. A thousand thousand hounds surface loping along the grey march. Their tongues pink and exposed and ice-chafed, whiskered muzzles zebraic with facets of cloven white. Their gums scalloped a darker pink, their gums bared and gnarled a traumatic hue, their gums clustered with milky crescent teeth. Pelted and knickerbockered a variation of colour, a mottle of browns, reds, rusts, yellows, silvers, blues. Coats to pillow the eye. Lemons and whiskeys and jets and gold oxides all assembling in unpeopled streets striated fire-pure and barren with snow coral. Old winter-feasted trees, choke cherries and aspens ailing and sharded in the godless thaw, holly and gold hyssop and shimmering sneezeweed felled low before the raptured greening, now trembling to herald the arrival of the dogs.

Snowflakes wheeled loose from snickering branches. Skinny Dinners stood watch, binoculars slack in the curvature of his neck, his hands balled under his singlet, his heart aching with a sweet local thunder.

He was stationed on the arch above Michigan Avenue, the strange primal terrain divested before him, and he could see all the way westward over half-collapsed factory rooftops, past shuttered bodyshop compounds and looted junkyard plots, beyond needle-littered stripmalls and uninviting newspapered Miller bars, all the way to the green pasteurised waters of the lower soak of the River Rouge...

Dec 2019 Writing Contest: Winner

The haunting, insightful, and linguistically decadent poem "ukemi" by Nicole Vento is the winner of the 2019 Lazuli Literary Group Writing Contest. We are excited to feature this poem, accompanied by a collection of additional poems by the author, in Volume 4, Issue 4 of AZURE.

"When the favored horse finally falls,
it suffocates instantly under the weight
of its ridiculous white teeth,
gross bouffant,
and bauble nails,
while the gelding next door,
four winters starved,
keeps darling Death
a dust cloud always,
one long cough away."

Dec 2018 Writing Contest: Winner

Congratulations to Osamase Ekhator for his winning entry, "Black Roses"!

"...This hood that covers, gives the same the trouble, the hood has over,
my nose, neck, and stressed shoulders.
Boulder sized soldier because boldness in my boney bones is bulging,
building compulsion to control composure,
but fuck that, every black boy has his explosions, maybe erosions too.
The Rose that rose from the concrete, not complete. Yet..."

The full poem will appear in Volume 3, Issue 4 of AZURE.

May 2018 Writing Contest: Winners

For the first time, two pieces (both of which happen to be poetry) have emerged as co-winners of the LLG Writing Contest.

We would like to congratulate Carlos Andres Gomez for "Kigali Memorial", a raw and sincere portrait of a boy's self-reflection upon confrontation with a genocide memorial. An excerpt:

"...Eye-level with the youth I outgrew,
my fingertips pressed against the glass, warm
as a father’s yawning throat, its unconscious grace,
I imagine someone taking my covers and smuggling

them to this hill in East Africa, as the air in my chest
thins, and all my adolescence abruptly erased.
What was I so busied with that incessant April?
How many souls perished each time I blinked?..."

We also congratulate M. Ann Reed for the profound metaphysical ruminations and diaphanous imagery in "Did you fall or rise from the cloud of unknowing?", a hint of which we provide for you below:

Did you follow Socrates through Athens, learning to unravel
with a question all the reasons that oppress life
When did we try to kill you?
And in killing you, kill ourselves?

Paradrops fall.

At sunrise, you are the giant peach surrounding
the rough ruby pit of you.
At sunset, you are the beating ruby pit, relinquishing
the juicy peach.

You are a paradox.

Both pieces are forthcoming in Volume 3, Issue 2 of AZURE.

January 2018 Writing Contest: Winner

Sam Reese is the winner of AZURE's January 2018 Writing Contest. His quietly magical short fiction piece, "Claimed by the Sea", will appear in Volume 2, Issue 4 of AZURE. Until then, please enjoy the excerpt below!

"...She was with me too, that morning, though she played a different role. For between the beds of rushes, naked and bluish-white, lay the broken body of the stranger from the sea.

"On other days the other girls would talk about the angles of his legs. You could feel the way his very bones seemed to wound him. Sometimes it was the dead-fish colour of his skin that they remembered, the look you see on drowned men when they wash up days after a storm. It was easy to forgive the others for believing he was dead. And for a few, those with good humour, it was his hair that stayed with him.

...

"What I remember, though, more than his storm-wracked body, was the spirit around him. It called to me. Where the others at once believed him dead, drawing back so as not to contaminate the holy robes, I sensed a will to live. I put aside my bundle, and touching my fingers to my temple, felt an echo of the shudder. Not for nothing had we half-drowned ourselves in search of octopus: I knew at once how to expel the brackish water from his chest, to pump sweet air back into this almost-emptied husk."

October 2017 Writing Contest: Winner

Congratulations to M.K. Rainey for her winning entry, the lushly lyrical prose piece "Crosshatching." You may read the work in its entirety in Volume 2, Issue 3 of AZURE.

"Hollow winds shook town, street sign, broke windows as the denizens scrambled for their cellar doors, storm shelters. Stella hunkered beneath the church, watching the others click rosary beads in time with the clacking shutters. The meadow grew dark and across town the little house wobbled and creaked and Posey watched the sky glow with those supernatural southern lights. The green winds winnowed the grass, sprayed long arcs in the brook, bled through the cracks in the weather-stripping until outside and inside married in the space around her. Posey wrung a threadbare pair of ballet slippers in her hands, the rank, homey smell of feet rising to meet her. Both mother and daughter looked to the sky and Posey came to know her new friend in the dark."

September 2016 Writing Contest: Winner

Susan E. Wadds is the winner of AZURE's September 2016 Writing Contest. The first two chapters of her novel What the Living Do was published in the Winter 2017 issue of AZURE. Congratulations, Susan!

"A turkey vulture drops a rope of intestine and lifts away into a hard blue sky. The dog at the roadside is some kind of mixed breed with a delicate snout and brindled coat. Mel eases the truck to a stop, and I clamp on my hardhat.
Overhead, the big bird carves a dark circle while Mel drags the shovel out of the truck bed. Even though I know the dog is dead, I squat to touch it just in case, but its jaw gapes, its legs are stiff as branches, and its milky eyes are open.
Michelangelo peeled the skins of cadavers. He was searching for a deeper mystery than how muscle attaches to bone. I am searching for something more too; not just a tag to name the owner of a dog. In the dead, Michelangelo found the underpinnings for his art. I haven't yet been able to name what it is I find in these still creatures."

January 2016 Writing Contest: Winner

Congratulations to Kirk Marshall for his winning entry in AZURE's January 2016 Writing Contest. The 5,000-word excerpt published in AZURE, Brass Tyrant and the American Thirst, is part of his forthcoming novel entitled Feverglades.

"The longer he lingered in The Brass Tyrant, the less transfixed he was by the women and the more vested he became in verifying the allure of the old liars, in gaining their approval and so inheriting their secrets. They each possessed the whittled oblique face of a church fresco icon, a chalk-white bust like a Hans Holbein cameo clamped in a locket. Yet assembled together, they resembled an Early Flemish panel-portrait executed by the Brothers van Eyk, the Ghent Altarpiece of Time-eaten Gremlins. Their rickety pisshead clan behaved in such a way that Briggs was often privately reminded of the Muppets in the mezzanine, as if Statler and Waldorf had emerged with raspy scorn from the television set to crack wise about the state of his life. He didn’t need anyone to explain to him that these men were gangsters, the fathers of criminal progeny."

Brass Tyrant and the American Thirst was published in the January/February 2016 issue of AZURE.

September 2015 Writing Contest: Winner

The winner of the September 2015 AZURE Writing Contest is Frank Light for "New Age Uncaged." Congratulations!
Below is a brief excerpt of Frank's hypnotic, sonorous verse:

"...Embargoes released
Prepare the feast
Ensnare the beast
Beware pretenders
Return to sender
Conspicuous contenders
Token defenders
Repeat offenders
Vendors, lenders
Solicitous mentors
Religious dissenters
Fringes to center
The mad monkey enters..."

The complete 49-page text of "New Age Uncaged" was published in the September/October 2015 issue of AZURE.

June 2015 Writing Contest: Winner

The winner of the June 2015 AZURE Writing Contest is Reg Darling for "Better Living Through Chemistry." Congratulations!

"The vestigial remnants of a child’s egocentric universe mingled with the naïve hippie spirit of the times—just let it happen, and all will be well. I would return to Clarion in January, and serendipitous circumstance would deliver a wonderful, if momentarily agonizing, opportunity for my nobility to falter."