Wyoming Arts Council

Apply Now for 2024 Neltje Blanchan and Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Writing Awards

Featured News | January 16, 2024

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The Wyoming Arts Council is now accepting applications for the 2024 Neltje Blanchan and Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Writing Awards. The Doubleday Award of $1,000 is given for the best poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or script written by a woman writer. The Blanchan Award, also $1,000, is given annually for the best poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or script informed by a relationship with the natural world.

Both awards are designed to bring attention to writers in Wyoming who have not yet received wide recognition for their work, and to support emerging writers at crucial times in their careers. Poets, fiction writers, essayists, and script writers who have published no more than one book in each genre and who are not full-time students or faculty members are invited to apply by submitting manuscripts and an entry form by the deadline.

Applications are accepted online via Submittable. The application deadline is March 15, 2024.

The Neltje Blanchan Memorial Writing Award and the Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Writing Award are made possible through the generosity of a private donor.

The 2024 Juror, Karen Auvinen

The juror for this year is Karen Auvinen. Karen is a poet, writer, mountain woman, outlier, and life-long westerner, and the author of the memoir Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living (Scribner), finalist for the Colorado Book Award and the Willa Award. Her work has appeared in “The New York Times,” “LitHub,” “Real Simple,” “Westword,” as well as “High Desert Journal,” “Ascent Magazine,” “Cold Mountain Review,” and “The Columbia Review,” among others. Her fiction has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and her poetry has won two Academy of American Poets Awards.

She is on the Graduate Faculty in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University and also teaches at CU-Boulder and for Lighthouse Writers and Fishtrap Writes. Karen lives with her partner, the artist Greg Marquez, at 8600 feet within the Roosevelt National Forest with River the dog and Dottie the cat. Currently, she is working on an intergenerational novel based on the life of her Grand Aunt Nina who was institutionalized in 1933 at the age of 21 and also publishes a weekly Substack: “A Woman’s Place is in the Wild.” A collection of short stories about outliers in the American West, The Porn Star of Pine Creek, is forthcoming.

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More information and history of these awards can be found at wyoarts.state.wy.us/wac-grant/creative-writing-fellowships

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A complete list of eligibility requirements and additional information can be found at the application link above. For more information, contact Kimberly Mittelstadt at 307-274-6673 or Kimberly.mittelstadt@wyo.gov.

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