The 2nd Annual Nashville Scene Short Fiction & Poetry Contest

Country music may be Nashville’s most visible contribution to American culture, but over the decades, our region has made some significant literary contributions as well.

Consider, for instance, that one of the country’s best-known literary groups originated in Nashville. What began in the summer of 1914 as a small, informal gathering among Vanderbilt undergraduates to discuss literature and philosophy evolved, by 1921, into a full-scale movement. The group consisted of such lights as Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom. The Fugitive, the publication they printed from the spring of 1922 until the winter of 1925, is considered by many critics to be the beginning of modern Southern literature.

In recent years, our city has been home to a number of celebrated authors, among them novelists Alice Randall, Tony Earley and Ann Patchett to name but a few. And within the state’s borders is an even broader, richer literary history: Knoxvillian James Agee gave the world the spectacularly lyric novel A Death in the Family, revolutionary social criticism in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and some of the most influential film criticism of the last century. Peter Taylor, a native of West Tennessee, wrote some of the most highly-praised short fiction of the last 50 years, as well as the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Summons to Memphis. And Knoxville native Cormac McCarthy is one of the most important novelists working today.

So, in the hope of making a small contribution to such a remarkable heritage, we present the Scene’s second annual Short Fiction & Poetry contest. This year, the contest grew beyond last year’s entry pool with over 800 submissions. We were thrilled with the both the volume of the response to our call for entries and the quality of the work.

The short fiction contest was judged first by special projects editor Adam Ross (who is a published fiction writer) and poet/columnist/editor Margaret Renkl. The finalists—12 in all—were passed along to our celebrity judge, novelist Alice Randall. Acclaimed poet Diann Blakely judged the poetry contest, reviewing over 500 submissions. We can’t thank them enough for their participation.

Most of all, we can’t congratulate the winners enough. Here’s to them, and to every writer who entered.

Poetry and Fiction Judges

Diann Blakely’s first poetry collection, Hurricane Walk, appeared in 1992 and was listed as one of the year’s 10 best books by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Her new volume, Farewell, My Lovelies, was released by Story Line Press in March 2000; a third manuscript, Cities of Flesh and the Dead, won the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, given for a work-in-progress by the Poetry Society of America. Her latest project is a cycle of “duets,” or call-and-response poems, with the songs of the bluesman Robert Johnson. These poems have been, or will be, printed by DoubleTake, Oxford American, the Paris Review and the Southern Review, among others. Winner of two Pushcart Prizes, as well as teaching awards from the University of Chicago and Vanderbilt University, Blakely has received fellowships to the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ conferences. She currently serves as a poetry editor of Antioch Review and as an arts reviewer for Nashville Scene/Village Voice Media.

Alice Randall was born in Detroit and graduated from Harvard in 1981. After a start as a journalist in Washington D.C., she moved to Nashville to become a country songwriter. The only African American woman ever to write a No. 1 country song, she has had more than 20 songs recorded. She is also a screenwriter and has worked on adaptations of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Parting the Waters, and Brer Rabbit. Randall first read Gone With the Wind when she was 12 and loved the novel. Years later, a question came to trouble her: Where were the mulatto children of Tara? It was a question that interested her personally: She is of mixed-race ancestry and has been told that her great-great-grandfather was Confederate Edmund Pettus. The Wind Done Gone is Alice Randall’s first novel.

—Illustrations by Amber Spencer

Note: Please join theScene to honor the winners at a public reading of their work at the Downtown Public Library this Thursday, Oct. 10, beginning at 7 p.m. Refreshments will be served.