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Lazuli Literary Group Writing Contest 2019 - Guidelines
$100 Prize / Deadline: Dec 22, 2019
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. Writers we admire are Zadie Smith, Virginia Woolf, Tom Wolfe, Jorge Luis Borges, Charles Dickens, Toni Morrison, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Tom Stoppard, John Keene, and James Baldwin.
**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 this price applies to shipments within the U.S. If you live outside the U.S. and would like to order a copy of AZURE, you may order through Amazon (Volume 1 or Volume 2).
- Deadline: Dec 22, 2019
- Both previously published and unpublished works are eligible, provided that potential publication on the Lazuli Literary Group website does not infringe on previously held rights.
- Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essays, philosophical ruminations, stageplays, fragments, chapters, 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.
- A cover letter is not required and will not affect the success of your submission.
- Simultaneous submissions are fine, even encouraged--your work deserves its due!
- Submission fee: $10
- 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.
- 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.
**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 this price applies to shipments within the U.S. If you live outside the U.S. and would like to order a copy of AZURE, you may order through Amazon (Volume 1 or Volume 2).
To send a non-contest general submission for publication in AZURE: A Journal of Literary Thought, please visit our submissions page.
PAST WINNERS
Dec 2018 Writing Contest: Winners
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:
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:
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."