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Rising Voices
AWARDS
About
The Rising Voices Awards are a collaboration between seven youth literary magazines–The Stirling Review, The Incandescent Review, SeaGlass Literary, The Globe Review, The Trailblazer Review, HaluHalo Journal, and Outlander Zine, as well as our 501(c)(3) partner Humanity Rising. The contest represents the first event ever of its kind, where a team of youth arts organizations join hands with renowned guest authors to create something amazing and display the immense changemaking potential of youth in literature. We are proud to present to you the first ever Rising Voices Awards: a writing contest for youth creatives aged 13-18, with $2,350 in prize money.
About OUR PARTNER:
HUMANITY RISING
Humanity Rising is a youth-centered nonprofit focusing on giving young changemakers a voice. We are excited to announce that we will be working with them to create the Rise Up Writing Challenge, a scholarship for ONE writer who sends in the best work centered around anti-bullying. As a special division of The Rising Voices Awards, entrants can be considered for this division via the checking the indicated box on the submission form.
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the 2024 Rising voices awards Winners are...
1st Place
Ava Grace Noe, Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science
"Pecan Shells", "Red Tail. Bob White.", "Girls Who Want to Drive Pick-Up Trucks", "Fall into the Creek", and "Glidval; a love letter to a girl who was just a friend"
2nd Place
Angela Cao, William A. Shine Great Neck South High School
"I am not my mothers daughter", "In the Case of a Monkey-Minded Girl", "Concerning visitations on the left-side of the heart", "Sunburnt", and "In
Which My Fingernails Carve Rhythm into Concrete"
3rd Place
Joanna Deng, Saint Andrew's School
"ARE YOU REALLY IN LOVE?", "godbless", "START, STOP.", "I Eat the Fish Eyes First Because", "re: missing piece"
1st Place
Naomi Bortnick, Walt Whitman High School
"The Knight"
2nd Place
Sydney Newman, Palo Verde High School
"My Favorite Color, Orange"
3rd Place
Kaila Patterson, St. Dominic's High School
"Wee Son"
1st Place
Adeola Adeniyan, Newark Collegiate Academy
"The Cosmic Tapestry: Contemplating Threats to the Universe"
2nd Place
Nikita Chanda, Singapore American School
"7 Signs You're A Girl"
3rd Place
Daisy Kim, Dublin Jerome High School
"Born Naked", "On Ideal Readers", "The Tightrope of Normalcy"
The recipient of the 2024 Rise Up Writing Scholarship of $1,000 is Daisy Kim with her piece, "The Tightrope of Normalcy".
Thank you to all who entered!!
Our Judges
Nickole Brown
Michael Leong
Desmond Hall
Indya
Finch
Nickole Brown is the author of Sister, first published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book, Fanny Says (BOA Editions), won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. Currently, she teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program and lives in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at several different animal sanctuaries. Since 2016, she’s been writing about these animals. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of these first nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. In 2021, Spruce Books of Penguin Random House published Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire, a book she co-authored with Jessica Jacobs, with whom she co-founded the SunJune Literary Collaborative. She’s also the President of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, an annual environmental literary festival set to launch in Black Mountain, NC, in October of 2025.
Michael Leong is the author of the critical study "Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry" (University of Iowa Press, 2020) and the poetry books "e.s.p." (Silenced Press, 2009), "Cutting Time with a Knife" (Black Square Editions, 2012), "Who Unfolded My Origami Brain?" (Fence Digital, 2017), and "Words on Edge" (Black Square Editions, 2018). His creative work has been anthologized in "The &NOW Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing" (Lake Forest College Press, 2013), "Best American Experimental Writing 2018" (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), and "Bettering American Poetry, Volume 3" (Bettering Books, 2019). His co-translation, with Ignacio Infante, of Vicente Huidobro’s long poem "Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven" was published by co•im•press in 2020. He serves on the editorial board of American Literature and the advisory board of Journal of Modern Literature. He is currently working on a long poem called "Disorientations" and a critical book tentatively entitled "Post-Craft: Essays on Pedagogy, Poetics, and Experimental Literature."
Desmond Hall was born in Jamaica, West Indies, and moved to Jamaica, Queens. He has worked as a high school biology and English teacher in East New York, Brooklyn; counseled teenage ex-cons after their release from Rikers Island; and served as Spike Lee’s creative director at Spike DDB. Desmond has served on the board of the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids and the Advertising Council and judged the One Show, the American Advertising Awards, and the NYC Downtown Short Film Festival. He’s also been named one of Variety magazine’s Top 50 Creatives to Watch. He is the author of the renowned gritty YA novel Your Corner Dark which confronts the harsh realities of gang life in Jamaica and how far a teen is willing to go for family. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and two daughters.
Indya is a graduate of Sam Houston State University where she studied film, and the Iowa Writers’
Workshop where she completed her MFA in fiction. She received the Meta and George Rosenburg Screenwriting Fellowship, the Truman Capote Fellowship, and support from the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared in the Oxford American, and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Iowa City and is working on a collection of short stories, a novel, and various screenwriting projects. Her writing practice is made up of fiction and screenwriting. In her own words: "Every piece I sit down to write begins as an experiment with a set of rules, and the challenge is to see if I can perform a magic trick again, if I can push myself a little further than the last piece of writing did."
Submission Closed
You must be 13-18 years old to submit.
Poetry: 3-100 lines per piece (up to 5 poems)
Critical Writing: 300-2,000 words per piece (up to 3 pieces)
Fiction: 300-2,000 words per piece (up to 3 pieces)
Entrants are allowed one submission per category. One submission is one google form entry, and includes up to a collection of pieces (see above). All submissions must be in DOCX, PDF, or txt. format. Previously published work is allowed, and so are simultaneous submissions. We own the publishing rights to all submitted works. Our contest theme is growth and coming-of-age, and though we do not require pieces to strictly adhere, we highly encourage submitted works to at least possess a loose connection to it. Thank you for your submission!
PRIZES:
$200 for 1st Place, $150 for 2nd Place, $100 for 3rd place in each division
1x $1,000 Scholarship for the winner of the Rise Up Writing Challenge for Anti-Bullying Related Works
Contest Timeline
December 1st
Submissions open.
January 30th
Submissions close.
Feb 1st - Mar 9th
Round one of the judging process will take place. All pieces will be judged by a panel of editors from our team of seven magazines.
March 15th
The ~40 finalist pieces from each category will be sent to our professional judges the final judging. The list of finalists will be announced on our social media and contacted.
April 10th
Winners will be announced and prize money distributed.
Our Team
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