Glass Woman Prize

THE GLASS WOMAN PRIZE

- The Sixth Glass Woman Prize reading period is now in effect through September 21, 2009. Please see guidelines below. -

THE WINNING STORY FOR THE FIFTH GLASS WOMAN PRIZE is L. K. Clark's stunning story "Sacred Explosion."

RUNNER UP PRIZE WINNERS are Folakemi Emem-Akpan' story "Househelp," Kirsty Logan’s story "The Man From The Circus," and Pat Devlin's story "Piece Man."

The nine top contenders for the Fourth Glass Woman Prize are Kristin Baldwin Seeman's story "Gold, The Currency Of Survival," Risa Basdeo's story "An Eye For An Eye," Michelle Cacho-Negrete's story "Roses At The End Of Summer," Paige Doughty's story "Lightening," Greta Igl's story "The Wayside," Rachel Kempf's story "Love Letter," Arianna Layton's story "Nearly Nine," Lydia Reid's story "The Cottage," and Jessica Tomkinson's story "If."

I received 392 entries for the Fifth Glass Woman Prize. Thanks to all 392 of you who have honored me with your inspiring submissions! It seemed more difficult than ever to make the final decisions. I ended up with 21 very compelling stories, 48 more stories that touched me tremendously, and many more of the remaining entries were on my mind long after I read them. This time I would also like to thank all of the readers who have helped me with some of the preliminary selections. They are: Beverley Barry, Sarah Bartosek, Annabelle Berrios, Tavi Black, Deborah K. Bundy, Ranjabali Chaudhuri, Elise Clark, Libby Cudmore, Gerri Davis, Cathy Doheny, Folakemi Emem-Akpan, Shaula Evans, Lydia Fazio Theys, Elizabeth Kathryn Gerold-Miller, Amy Hanridge, Jeanne Johnson, Subhashree Kishore, Arianna Layton, Gabi MacEwan, Dorla Moorehouse, Anna-May Nagle, Suzanne Elaine Nelson, Kim Robinson, Linda Simoni-Wastila, Nancy Smith, June Sorensen, Persephone Vandegrift, Janice Wiley-Dorn, and Mercedes M. Yardley. Thanks you, my friends; I couldn't have done it without you.

Keep writing! Ursula K. Le Guin writes: "We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains." I, for one, am beginning to see some of the new landscapes we are creating, for which I thank each and every one of you.

To see past winning and top stories click here.

Illustration on this page: "A Continuous Celebration of All Things Wonderful" by Marta L. Sanchez, www.poetryandart.org, reproduced by generous permission of the amazing artist

GUIDELINES FOR The sixth Glass Woman Prize:

The Sixth Glass Woman Prize will be awarded for a work of short fiction or creative non-fiction (prose) written by a woman. Length: between 50 and 5,000 words. The top prize for the sixth Glass Woman Prize award is US $700 and possible (but not obligatory) online publication; I will also award two runner up prizes of $100 each and two runner up prizes of $50 each, together with possible (but not obligatory) online publication.

Subject is open, but must be of significance to women. My criterion is passion, excellence, and authenticity in the woman’s writing voice. Previously published work and simultaneous submissions are OK. Previous Glass Woman Prize winners are welcome to submit again. Copyright is retained by the author.

There is no reading fee.

Submission deadline: September 21, 2009 (receipt date; anything received after that date will be considered for a future prize). Notification date: December 21, 2009.

The winner will be announced on this website. Submissions will not be returned, rejected, or otherwise acknowledged except for the winner announcement. I promise that every submission will be read with respect and with my commitment to the voices of women in this world.

One submission per person per prize submission period, by email, with "Glass Woman Prize Submission" in the subject line and the text pasted in the body of the email (no attachments!) to:

glasswomanprize@comcast.net

or in hard copy and via regular mail, to:

Beate Sigriddaughter
333 East 16th Avenue, #517
Denver, CO 80203

IMPORTANT:
If submitting by email:
-    "Glass Woman Prize Submission" in subject line
-    Text in body of email
-    Please put your email address in the body of the email as well

I will regretfully ignore and delete submissions of anything other than specified above, for example: submissions with any kind of attachment, more than one piece of writing in a given prize reading period, more than 5,000 words, poetry, or submissions without "Glass Woman Prize Submission" in the subject line of the email.

Some additional information

Who judges the contest?

At the moment I am the final judge, but a number of women writers have agreed to read a number of submissions and make preliminary selections. I am very happy about this because my personal tastes and passions will no longer be the sole criteria for selecting future winners.

How is the prize funded?

The prize is funded with ten percent of my personal income. It therefore has a chance of increasing in the future.

Why?

Because this is something I would have liked to have received for myself. Since I haven’t, at least not recently, and in order to make things right with the world all the same, I feel I have to offer it to someone else.

Why the name Glass Woman Prize?

I’ve been playing with the glass woman concept for a while. I want women to be able to acknowledge, transparently, who we are, and that who we are is not trivial and unimportant, despite the fact that it is not typically rewarded in a man-made and money-motivated world.

Here’s my original description of a glass woman as I would depict her if I were a visual artist: a woman of glass, with a blood system and gut system visible inside her, pipes and veins, and in those there would be bits of poetry, newspapers, roses, sentimental things, baby’s teeth, locks of baby hair, all kinds of lace bits, birds, and foxes, ice-picks, wedding rings, veils, and wedding cake doves, graduations gowns, tarot cards, sacred stones, pressed flowers, and a whole lot of joy and a whole lot of sorrow. She’d have a flute and a piano key, an ankh, and a woman symbol (♀), everything, anger and joy, hiking gear, rock climbing gear, motorcycle gear, dirt, fear, bras, lilacs, mirrors, underwear.

What about the brittleness of glass? I would make it unbreakable glass, transparent, but shatter-proof.

Kathee from Golden provided the following additional food for thought about the mysterious quality of glass:

Glass is tremendously mysterious, neither solid nor liquid; the scientific world, at least, still does not know quite what to make of it, but suspects that even beyond its practical and nurturing ability to allow light through yet keep the harsh elements out, glass promises further understanding regarding the very nature of how things interact:

from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/science/29glass.html:

“They’re the thickest and gooiest of liquids and the most disordered and structureless of rigid solids,” said Peter Harrowell, a professor of chemistry at the University of Sydney in Australia, speaking of glasses, which can be formed from different raw materials. “They sit right at this really profound sort of puzzle.”

Philip W. Anderson a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at Princeton, wrote in 1995: “The deepest and most interesting unsolved problem in solid state theory is probably the theory of the nature of glass and the glass transition.”

Why no reading fee?

Because I absolutely hate the way every other journal or other entity nowadays uses reading fees for contests as fundraisers. I can see their point. I still hate it.

What am I trying to accomplish with this?

I want to help along the cause of women expressing themselves authentically and fearlessly and passionately. It has something to do with a contribution to justice and soul growing in the world.

One of my ex-husbands once said that women don't support each other. I want to either change that or prove it wrong. This is my small gesture of changing the world.