At the beginning of the year, I submitted to the Norman Mailer 4-Year College Writing Award for Creative Nonfiction. Last week, I received this rejection from them. It’s a bit of a bummer because I will not be able to enter the contest again. The email came in on my cell-phone and I had to keep scrolling through trying to figure out if I won.

October 13, 2011

Dear Brandi Ballard,

Thank you for participating in the 2011 Norman Mailer Four-Year College Writing Award for Creative Nonfiction competition. On behalf of the Norman Mailer Center and Writers Colony and the National Council of Teachers of English, we honor your commitment to the craft of writing.

Norman Mailer produced extraordinary writing in many genres, and he was a true pioneer in the emerging realm of creative nonfiction. Evaluation criteria for this award reflected qualities of writing he pursued across a lifetime: originality; insight; clear voice and style; artful arrangement of elements and materials; and overall aesthetic, emotional, or intellectual effect. While your work is not among those very few pieces selected for national recognition, by entering the awards contest you have distinguished yourself as a student who takes this challenging genre seriously and is committed to high levels of achievement.

One way that we can help you find a broader audience for your work is to invite you to submit it to the National Gallery of Writing. It takes only minutes to submit your work, and if it is accepted, it will become part of the portrait of America’s writing spotlighted on the National Day on Writing. It will remain online in the National Gallery through next June, thus reaching readers from around the world for most of the year ahead.

Thank you for participating in the Norman Mailer Four-Year College Writing Award competition. Great luck to you pursuing your gift as a writer. We hope that the resources of the Norman Mailer Center and Writers Colony and the National Council of Teachers of English can be of service to you across your life journey.

Sincerely yours,

Kent Williamson, Executive Director
National Council of Teachers of English

Lawrence Schiller, President and Co-Founder
Norman Mailer Center and Writers Colony

I am not sure if I am going to submit work to the National Gallery of Writing or not. Maybe. Does it count as a publishing credential? I suppose so as they have to accept it. I would need to read through the submissions and see. Rejection sucks but I am in an excellent writing program now. The $10,000 prize would really have helped me next summer when I won’t have an income.

Reposted from the Writerly Habit