Kore Press was founded in 1993 by the creative efforts of book designer Lisa Bowden and poet Karen Falkenstrom. Kore's vision has been to publish and distribute excellent works of literary and artistic value by a diversity of women, including those traditionally underrepresented in the cultural mainstream; to promote those voices; and to educate young people about publishing and literary activism.

Shannon Cain became the fiction editor of Kore Press in 2009, after serving for four years as Executive Director. Previously, she was Executive Director of the Women's Health Education Project, an East Harlem-based social service agency; President of Cain & Company Fundraising; and Executive Director of the Amazon Foundation, a private philanthropy. She earned her MFA in 2005 from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and has taught fiction writing at the University of Arizona. In 2006, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. Her stories have been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. Her short story collection, „The Necessity of Certain Behaviors”, was a Semifinalist for the 2006 Sarabande Books Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and the Iowa Short Fiction Award.

Lisa Bowden, poet, book designer and editor, co-founded Kore Press in 1993 and served as Executive Director for 11 years. She is currently the Publisher of Kore Press. Lisa was Production Manager at Chax Press, a publisher of innovative and experimental poetry; and Senior Designer at the University of Arizona Press, garnering two University Press Design awards. In 2005 she received an ADDY Award (the world's largest advertising creative contest) for a design collaborative on conference materials for His Holiness the Dalai Lama. She has served on non-profit boards of directors for 20 years. She is the editor of the audio anthology „Autumnal: A Collection of Elegies”, and is a poet who works collaboratively with dancer and musicians.



Prize: $1,000 for first place. Plus publication of submission by Kore Press.

Deadline: 31th August 2010

Fee: $20 for one entry.

Submission Guidelines:
This competition is open to any female writer who has not published a full-length collection of poetry. Writers who have had chapbooks of less than 42 pages printed in editions of no more than 400 copies are eligible.
Manuscripts must be min 48 pages, max 80 pages, anonymous (do not include your name anywhere on the manuscript) and original.

Judge: Bhanu Kapil
Bhanu Kapil is a British-Indian writer, and new U.S. citizen, who lives now in Colorado, where she is core faculty at Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. She also teaches writing at Goddard College in Vermont. She is the author of four books: "The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers" (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), "Incubation: a space for monsters" (Leon Works, 2006), "humanimal [ a project for future children]" (Kelsey Street, 2009), and "Schizophrene" (forthcoming from Nightboat Books, 2011.)

Contact: [email protected] (United States)