The 2010 Writing Award winners have been chosen, please try again next year.
As a student of CU Boulder you live, breathe, eat, drink, and sleep the West. Whether you first saw the Rocky Mountains the day classes began or you were raised on a cattle ranch in Greeley, you possess a knowledge of the West all your own. Here is a rare opportunity to transform this unique knowledge into cash. All you need to do is put it to paper. And you can do so in whatever genre that suits your creative impulse: poetry, fiction, memoir, or non-fiction. You don't even have to write something new! Search your hard drive for stories, poems, papers, anything you've written for classes that deal with the West. There's no entry fee, and hence nothing to lose. So go ahead, enter different pieces in different categories. You could win up to $2,000!!
What is Western Writing? It's writing about the West. And what is that? In many ways that's for you to decide. It could be the spiny ridge of the continental divide; or a random rodeo you stumble upon on a road trip; or the road trip itself; or branding time on the ranch; or your experience growing up in a border town; or the skinning of a deer; or environmental conservation; or your experience as an immigrant; or old, decrepit drive ins; or the borderlands. Some topics you could address include:
- A naturalistic essay about the flora and fauna you discover on a backpacking trip into the Indian Peaks Wilderness
- A memoir about what the West was to you growing up (whether you grew up in Boston or Tucson)
- A critique of the new Jesse James Film
- An evaluation of the Lynx re-introduction program
- A poem about calving season an essay on the culture of border towns
- An analysis of Boulder's Open Space Program
But these are just suggestions. The topics are as vast as New Mexican night sky.
Go through your past class papers; or pull together those memories, feelings, facts, and opinions, and write something new! Whatever you do, enter.
First prize awards are $500 each. You may submit up to four entries (one entry maximum per category) and so could conceivably win first prize in each! That's $2,000!
Each category has its own panel of judges. This is a blind contest, so the judges will not have authors' names as they review the entries.
- Graduate Nonfiction: including academic papers, journalism, essays
- Undergraduate Nonfiction: including academic papers, journalism, essays
- Graduate Fiction: including short stories, novels, plays, screenplays
- Undergraduate Fiction: including short stories, novels, plays, screenplays
- Poetry: single poems only (no collections) - open to students at all levels of study
- Memoir/Creative Nonfiction: - open to students at all levels of study
See official rules for more details.