Lidia Yuknavitch to judge Kore’s 2016 Memoir Award

A prize of $1000 and publication by Kore Press for a full-length memoir, or memoir-in-essays, to a female writer.

Lidia YuknavitchLidia YuknavitchLidia Yuknavitch (judge) is the National Bestselling author of the novels THE SMALL BACKS OF CHILDREN (Harpers) and DORA: A HEADCASE (Hawthorne Books), and the memoir THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER (Hawthorne Books), as well as three books of short fictions – HER OTHER MOUTHS, LIBERTY’S EXCESS (FC2), and REAL TO REEL (FC2), and a critical book on war and narrative, ALLEGORIES OF VIOLENCE (Routledge). Her writing has appeared in publications including Guernica Magazine, Ms., The Iowa Review, Zyzzyva, Another Chicago Magazine, The Sun, Exquisite Corpse, TANK, and in the anthologies Life As We Show It (City Lights), Wreckage of Reason (Spuytin Duyvil), Forms at War (FC2), Feminaissance (Les Figues Press), and Representing Bisexualities (SUNY), as well as online at The Rumpus. She writes, teaches and lives in Portland, Oregon with the filmmaker Andy Mingo and their renaissance man son Miles. She is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award – Reader’s Choice, a PNBA award, and was a finalist for the 2012 Pen Center creative nonfiction award. She is a very good swimmer.

LY: “In 1986 my daughter died the day she was born. From her I became a writer. My writing is informed, deformed, and reformed by these things:

  1. I think gender and sexuality are territories of possibility. Nevermind what we’ve been told or what the choices appear to be. Inside artistic practice the possibilities open back up.
  2. I think narrative is quantum.
  3. I think the writer is a locus through which intensities pass.
  4. I think literature is that which fights back against the oppressive scripts of socialization and good citizenship.
  5. I think the space of making art is freedom of being.
  6. I think things that happen to us are true. Writing is a whole other body.
  7. I believe in art the way other people believe in god.

I have had lots of jobs. Some of my favorites were being on an all male house painting crew, because you could see and touch your labor and it had concrete meaning and I could drink beer, pee standing up, and fart anytime I wanted; seasonal farm work like picking basil and fruit because I got to be outside and meet cool people; working on the road crew with Mexicans two of the times I was arrested.

In the more recent past all my jobs have been bourgeois teaching gigs. I don’t know what I think about teaching. Mostly I show up and beg people to have a dialogue with me about ideas. I do feel lucky to have a job and health insurance. Its just hard to be an isolate and do something so public every day.

Oh. And I am a very, very good swimmer. Which must be why, as my friend Mia says, I have not drowned. When pulled under, kick.”

How to Submit Your Manuscript

Note: Contest is open Oct 1-Dec 31, 2015 midnight MST. This competition is a new Award from Kore Press and will be open each year to any female-identified writer writing in English. Relatives and recent students (of one semester or more) of the judge are not eligible to submit their work. Winner announced March 2016.

Comment box should include:
• Daytime and evening telephone numbers
• Where you heard about the contest

Manuscripts must be:
• A minimum of 150 pages and a maximum of 300 pages. no cover letter needed.
• Anonymous (do not include your name anywhere on the manuscript)
• Original memoir or memoir-in-essays written by applicant (translations are not eligible)

• $25 reading fee

• Submit online here. More guidelines provided on submissions page.

For more information email us or call 520-327-2127.

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