The Annual $5,550 Margaret Reid Poetry Prize for Traditional Verse is open! The annual $5,550 Tom Howard Short Story, Essay and Prose Contest is also open for entries! And also open is the annual $5,550 Tom Howard Poetry Contest for Verse in All Styles and Genres. 

In both prose and poetry contests, an eye-catching title is always important. The aim is to pique the judge’s interest as soon as he or she catches sight of your entry. Judges, who are maybe a little wearied or bored at this stage, will definitely rouse themselves to read your story or poem with some enthusiasm.

Take a look at these titles in the latest anthology of 98 poems by Tom Howard,  now on sale at Amazon and other book stores: Access Denied, The Air Itself Is Burning, Courting Food, Dancing Cups, A Deserted Whistle Stop in Durango, Does God Keep Score?, In Memory I Walk Slow, Leni of the Blue Light, Make Up Its Mind Day, My Mona Lisa, Old Mother Riley Meet Sexton Blake, Season's Choices, A Steppe on the River Nazos, Stepping In and Closing Off, Streetcar R.I.P., Tic-Toc, Trelawny of the Mouses, Walking with El Senor. Please click this link for more details: Escape to Paradise and Other Poetic Fancies. 

The website for the Tom Howard Poetry Contest is http://tomhowardpoetry.bravepages.com

The latest Margaret Reid anthology is Love & City Dreaming: Poems by Margaret Havill Reid. Margaret's range and versatility in this book provide an excellent guide to the verse we are seeking for the Margaret Reid Prize. Margaret was a great champion of humorous verse, for example, illustrated in this book by delightful parodies like "The Wiz of Wizzinzee" and "Muzzacoffalox". She wrote serious poetry too, like "Face of the City", romantic verse such as "Loving You", spiritual verse ("His Light") , descriptive ("Nodding Among Geraniums"), political ("Myopia"), philosophical ("Was There a Silver Sea?"), reflective ("Time"), satirical ("Blinking into Day"), children's ("Mida, the Spider"), playful ("Superstar'), serious ("Raging Planet"), you-name-it ("The Hall of Mirrors").

You'll also find plenty of rousing titles in our previous anthologies of winning entries such as SAILING IN THE MIST OF TIME: Award-Winning Poems. 108 award-winning and commended poems are gathered in a large-format, 196-page book!

For more information,  I recommend my Write Ways to WIN WRITING CONTESTS: How To Join the Winners' Circle for Prose and Poetry Awards, If you've been wasting your time and money sending great stories or magnificent poems to Contests that immediately place them in the reject basket, here's a book to set you on the right path.

This year, the prize pool for our prose and poetry contests have been increased to $5,550 (including a First Prize of $3,000). Entry fees have not been raised. The entry fee for the prose contest remains at $15 for each short story or essay up to 5,000 words in length. There are ten cash prizes in all, but the judges do reserve the right to award extra cash prizes if they so desire. For the last prose contest, the judges awarded no less than $500 in additional prizes, bringing the total prize pool up to $5,850 instead of the advertised $5,350!

To enter your poems in our current poetry contests, you will find full information at http://margaretreid.exactpages.com OR http://poetrycontests.exactpages.com. You will note that although the prize-money has been increased, entry fees do remain at $7 for every 25 lines. 

Unlike almost all other poetry contests, we impose no limits on the number of lines or number of poems you may submit.

You can also visit the home page of http://www.winningwriters.com and click on the contests at the top left of the screen.

As stated above, the Tom Howard Short Story, Essay & Prose Contest is open. Entries will close on March 31, 2010. Again, let me make it clear at once that we are seeking entries in ALL categories, including "literary" fiction, but most particularly we would like to award prizes to popular, everyday, mainstream stories, essays and prose, as even a casual glance at our anthologies of winning and commended entries such as Keep Watching the Skies! An Anthology of Prize-Winning Short Stories will soon make plain. You'll find full details at http://shortstorycontest.0catch.com

One of the key recommendations in my Write Ways to WIN WRITING CONTESTS is that you take a look at some of the entries that have won prizes in previous contests. This will give you some idea of the types and varieties of stories and prose pieces that have won prizes in the past. The book I recommend here is WATCHING TIME: Anthology of Prizewinning Essays & Short Stories. Here are the eye-catching titles: Chocolate Covered Crickets, Sitting at the Gate of the Temple, Naxos Nights, The Guernsey Doll, Geraldine Fitzgerald and St Patrick's Day in Pittsburgh, Salesman of the Decade, Fan-Fan, The Dead Zone, Phantom Feelings, Cell Block, Out of Darkness, My Mother's Table, Homesteaders, The Meal, Watching Time.

And finally I notice Amazon are still selling the new, expanded edition of "Write Ways..." for only $11.25 (which is considerably less than the original edition, even though the new edition has more pages and lots more valuable information): Write Ways to WIN WRITING CONTESTS: How To Join the Winners' Circle for Prose and Poetry Awards, NEW EXPANDED EDITION