Joanna Preston: Tasmanaut Poet
I've just about finished making the selections for the anthology. Everything has been read, re-read, and re-reread. Longlists have been compiled, and shortlists are emerging. Fingers crossed, I should be able to get notifications out by the end of next week. The mechanics of selection are pretty much the same for judging a competition and …
Continue reading "The difference between judging and editing"
When your entries arrive at the NZPS (comfortably before the cut-off date, naturally), the competition secretary enters the details (your name and address, plus the titles, first lines etc of your entries) in a database, and assigns a unique code number to each individual entry. The two copies are separated (of course, you followed all …
I thought it might be interesting to post a couple of times through the process of editing this year's NZPS anthology. There's no official secrecy about it, but an awful lot of people don't seem to know how the process works. So lets start with some real duh moments. The first time I edited the …
Continue reading "Things to avoid when entering a poetry competition"
Finally I am allowed to reveal ... I was Highly Commended in the Open Poetry section! Woohoo! Ok, that was a bit lame. But the fact is that I've never managed to get even a special mention in the Open section before. And this is the poem I blogged about earlier in the year, so …
Continue reading "New Zealand Poetry Society competition 2008"
This is a shameless plug for a book that is due out in two months time; Christchurch poet and writer Helen Lowe's debut novel Thornspell. It's a young adult fantasy, based on Sleeping Beauty. I was fortunate enough to read it in draft form, and it really is a cracking story. Knopf grabbed it as …
A Dark Feathered Art 