Category: Judge

Rita Banerjee will serve as a judge for the 2020 “What Comes Next?” Writing Competition sponsored by Sustainable Montpelier.  Writers are welcome to submit new work in the genres of short story, essay, and graphic story to the competition by June 23, 2020.  More information on the contest follows below and applications are now live here.

The Sustainable Montpelier Coalition is inviting writers and graphic artists of all ages to imagine what Central Vermont will be like in the year 2047. This world won’t be darkly dystopian: rather, it will describe innovative solutions, for how the people of this region dealt with the ever growing effects of climate change and the after-effects of Covid-19. What if a 12-foot snowstorm cut off power and transportation? How would we recover from a massive drought or a terrible flood? What if there were another pandemic? What would neighbors do for neighbors if public services were not available?

Learn more about the “What Comes Next?” writing competition on Sustainable Montpelier and in the Times Argus.

Rita Banerjee will judge the 2019 Spider Roard Press Flash Fiction Prize.  Spider Road Press is proud to sponsor the annual Spider’s Web Flash Fiction Prize to recognize unpublished flash fiction featuring a complex, female-identifying protagonist! Entries to the 2019 Spider’s Web Flash Fiction Prize will be accepted from February 17, 2019 to May 17, 2019. The contest is open to writers of all genders.  Writers can begin submitting their Flash Fiction entries to the contest on February 17 at: https://spiderroadpress.submittable.com/submit

About the Judge:

Rita Banerjee is the Director of the MFA in Writing & Publishing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.  As a writer, she is the co-editor (with Diana Norma Szokolyai) of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, May 2018), and the author of the poetry collection Echo in Four Beats (Finishing Line Press, March 2018), which was named one of Book Riot’s “Must-Read Poetic Voices of Split This Rock 2018”, was nominated for the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and was selected by Finishing Line Press as their 2018 nominee for the National Book Award in Poetry.  Banerjee is also the author of the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps (Spider Road Press, 2016), and the poetry chapbook Cracklers at Night (Finishing Line Press, 2010).  As a filmmaker, she is the co-writer and co-director (with David Shields) of Burning Down the Louvre (April 2019), a documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France.  Her work appears in Poets & Writers, Nat. Brut., Hunger Mountain, and elsewhere.  Her writing is represented by literary agents Jeff Kleinman and Jamie Chambliss of Folio Literary Management.

Poet, editor, professor and Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop Rita Banerjee will judge the 2017 Minerva Rising “Dare to Speak” Poetry Chapbook Contest.  Winner receives $250 and 10 copies of chapbook.  More information on contest available here. 

Minerva Rising is an independent literary press, celebrates the creativity and wisdom in every woman by giving them space to tell their stories and to tell them well.   This year’s contest embodies and embraces the theme “Dare to Speak” by opening up the Minerva Rising annual chapbook contest to writers whose voices have been suppressed.  If your poetry speaks a message that has never been heard before, the Universe is ripe to listen.  Now is the season to Dare.

Writers are invited to submit 14-36 pages of a chapbook-length poetry manuscript (along with a table of contents and acknowledgements page) to Minerva Rising by December 1, 2017.  Submission fee is $20.  Applications open at minervarising.submittable.com:

Rita Banerjee is the editor of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, March 2018) and the author of the poetry collection Echo in Four Beats (Finishing Line Press, February 2018), which was a finalist for the Red Hen Press Benjamin Saltman Award, Three Mile Harbor Poetry Prize, and Aquarius Press / Willow Books Literature Award, the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps (Spider Road Press, 2016), and the poetry chapbook Cracklers at Night (Finishing Line Press, 2010). She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, and her writing appears in Poets & Writers, Nat. Brut., The Scofield, The Rumpus, Painted Bride Quarterly, Mass Poetry, Hyphen Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, AWP WC&C Quarterly, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Riot Grrrl Magazine, The Fiction Project, Objet d’Art, KBOO Radio’s APA Compass, and elsewhere. She is the Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop and teaches on modernism, art house film, and South Asian literary theory and aesthetics at the Institute for Indology and Tibetology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Germany.  She is currently working on a documentary film about race, voyeurism, and intimacy in the United States and in France, a novel about a Tamil-Jewish American family in crisis during a post-authoritarian regime, and a collection of essays on race, sex, politics, and everything cool.