Announcing the Seventh Annual Thomas Morton Memorial Prize in Literary Excellence

The Puritan is proud to announce that this year's writing contest, the Seventh Annual Thomas Morton Memorial Prize in Literary Excellence is now open! This year our writing contest will be judged by Zoe Whittall (fiction) and Kaveh Akbar (poetry). We couldn’t be more excited about this year’s judges and we hope you are too. This year the prize includes $1,000 for the winners in fiction and poetry, as well as publication in our Fall 2018 Issue 43. One runner-up in each category will also receive $200 and publication in our Fall 2018 Issue. The prize will also include a book prize pack, generously donated by Canadian publishers. In early November we will announce a short list in each category. The winners will be announced at our Black Friday Party and published online shortly after. The deadline to enter is September 30, 2018. You can enter the writing contest by visiting our submissions page. Zoe Whittall’s third novel, The Best Kind of People, is being adapted for feature film by Sarah Polley, was shortlisted for The Giller Prize, named Indigo’s #1 Book of 2016, selected as a Heather’s Pick and a best book of the year by Walrus Magazine, The Globe & Mail, Toronto Life, & The National Post. She has worked as a TV writer on IFC’s The Baroness Von Sketch Show, which Vogue Magazine called “the best thing out of Canada since Ryan Gosling” and Crawford, a new comedy by the creators of the Trailer Park Boys, coming to Comedy Central in 2018. She has also written three volumes of poetry, most recently a new edition of The Emily Valentine Poems, which poet Eileen Myles blurbed with “This reminds me that I would like to know everything about this person.” Her next novel, The Spectacular, is forthcoming in 2019 with Ballantine in the U.S. and Harpercollins in Canada. Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear recently in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Times, The Nation, Tin House, Best American Poetry, The New Republic, The Guardian, Ploughshares, PBS NewsHour, Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, The Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Best New Poets,and elsewhere. His debut full-length collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, is just out with Alice James in the US and Penguin in the UK, and his chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press. The recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently teaches at Purdue University and in the low residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson.