Contest

Surging Tide is pleased to launch our inaugural writing & art contest this summer. This year, the contest theme is SYNTHESIS. Please find below a more detailed prompt as well as guidelines on how to submit.

Surging Tide editors will shortlist 3-4 writers and artists in each category (poetry, prose, visual art) whose works we believe engage most imaginatively with the contest prompt, SYNTHESIS. We will forward this list onto the judges, who will select a winner and a runner-up. All shortlisted writers and artists will be guaranteed publication in Surging Tide, Issue 07. In addition, the winner and runner-up will receive written commentary from their respective contest judges. The winning artist will have their artwork featured on the cover of Surging Tide, Issue 07.

Entrants can submit ONE piece per category per submission or up to FIVE pieces with a donation to Surging Tide. Multi-genre submissions allowed (i.e. you can submit one poem and one flash fiction, but not two poems.) In addition to publication, the winner of each category will be awarded $100 and each runner-up will also be awarded $25. There is no fee to enter.

CONTEST JUDGES

Poetry Judge

I.S. Jones is an American / Nigerian poet, essayist and former music journalist. She is a Graduate Fellow with The Watering Hole and holds fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT Writer’s Retreat, and Brooklyn Poets. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Washington Square Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, LA Review of Books, The Rumpus, The Offing, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in Poetry at UW–Madison where she was the inaugural 2019–2020 Kemper K. Knapp University Fellowship and is the 2021-2022 Hoffman Hall Emerging Artist Fellowship recipient. For the last three years, she served the Director of the Watershed Reading Series with Art + Literature Laboratory. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Frontier Poetry.

Prose Judge

Angie Sijun Lou is the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Her writings have appeared in Poetry Northwest, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Best Small Fictions, The Margins, and others. She is a Kundiman Fellow, Tin House Scholar, Fiction Editor at FENCE, and a Ph.D. Candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at UC Santa Cruz.

Visual Art Judge

Hangama Amiri works predominantly in textiles to examine notions of home, as well as the ways in which gender, social norms, and larger geopolitical conflict impact the daily lives of women, both in Afghanistan and in the diaspora. Her recent bodies of work have taken a new turn of narratives and a new lens on the domestic spaces created by the Afghan people as a response to political controls. Continuing to use textiles as the medium, Amiri searches to define, explore, and question these spaces. The figurative tendency in her work is due to her interest in the power of representation, especially of those objects that are ordinary to our everyday life, such as a passport, a vase, or celebrity postcards.

Amiri holds an MFA from Yale University where she graduated in 2020 from the Painting and Printmaking Department. She received her BFA from NSCAD University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and is a Canadian Fulbright and Post-Graduate Fellow at Yale University School of Art and Sciences (2015-2016). Her work is exhibited nationally and internationally in New York City, Toronto, France, Italy, London (UK), and Sofia, Bulgaria. Amiri was also an artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Fall 2017), Joya AiR Residency Program in Almería, Andalucía, Spain (Winter 2017), World of CO Residency program in Sofia, Bulgaria (Spring 2018), and at Long Road Projects in Jacksonville, Florida (Summer 2019).

CONTEST THEME: SYNTHESIS

Synthesis
(noun, verb)

A modern form of literary & artistic alchemy
(philosophy) the final stage in the process of dialectical reasoning, where a new idea resolves the conflict between thesis and antithesis
The amalgamation of genre and form to subvert historical complexes in the creation of iconopoetic, unapologetic art.

For this contest, we want pieces that combine styles, mediums, and historical inspirations. Give us your back-of-the-google-drive, your too-experimental-to-submit. We and the judges are ready for your genre infusions and lyric essays, sonata-erasures, your abecedarians in another tongue. We want your courage, your defiance, your experimental ecstasy.

HOW TO ENTER

CONTEST SUBMISSION BOX

Attach your submission as a .pdf or .jpg only using the form on the left. Please name your file [NAME OF FIRST/ONLY PIECE].

An entrant may submit only one piece per category (poetry/prose/art) for consideration without an entry fee. With a donation, an entrant can submit up to five pieces per category. All donations go to maintaining Surging Tide's website, supporting new projects, and paying our judges. Please donate on our support page.

All submissions are judged anonymously. Please ensure that your file attachment has no identifying details.

Simultaneous submissions are accepted provided that they are acknowledged below and immediately withdrawn if accepted elsewhere.

Note: for writing submissions, we take .pdf files exclusively. Do not send your submissions as a word document. Please keep this in mind or we may not be able to read your submission.

All shortlisted and winning works will be published in Surging Tide, Issue 07.

We look forward to reading your work!

We are 100% volunteer-run! If you submit, please consider donating to help us maintain our website, continue writing our columns, and keep uplifting more experimental work!

THE FINE PRINT

We welcome submissions from all artists and writers, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, and geographic location.
All work should be previously unpublished.
For written submissions, please keep your pieces to under 2000 words (excluding title) for prose, and under 100 lines (excluding title) for poetry.
For visual art, both two- and three-dimensional art are accepted. In the Comments area, please write the medium(s) used and a brief (2-3 sentences) description of your work. Please do not submit fan art.
All work must be the submitter's original. If work is found to be plagiarized, the submitter will be disqualified from the contest.
Pieces may not be altered once submitted. You are more than welcome to enter work to more than one category.
There is no minimum amount designated for a donation. Surging Tide is 100% volunteer-run. Anything helps!
Surging Tide reserves the right to change the judging panel without notice.
Shortlisted artists will be notified early September. If shortlisted, please kindly withdraw any simultaneous submissions immediately.
Winners will be notified in mid-September.
Issue 07 featuring contest winners and shortlisted writers & artists will be released in late September.

SYnthesis