Our One-Act Contest and Short Fiction Contests have nurtured writers at the start of their careers–and helped them move on to further publications, book deals, and in one case, a Pulitzer Prize.

The deadline for submission is November 15, 2013, and the winner of this year’s contest will be announced by March 15th, 2014. Submission criteria includes a short story up to 7,000 words, written in English.

The grand prize includes:

The grand prize includes:

Additionally, the winning piece will be published in Bayou. The Top Ten finalists names will appear on the Festival’s website and they will receive a panel pass.

Submissions are accepted by mail or online. Instructions and guidelines can be found on the website.

Entry fee: $25.00

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We’re accepting submissions of 2-4 original, unpublished poems as contest entries. Deadline (postmark) for submissions is August 15, 2012.

Read our full submission guidelines and FAQ.

The winner — to be chosen by Ava Leavell Haymon (pictured), author of poetry collections Kitchen Heat and The Strict Economy of Fire — will receive a grand prize of:

The top ten finalists will receive a panel pass ($75 value) to attend the 2013 Festival, and their names will be published on www.tennesseewilliams.net.

Entry fee: $20 per entry.

The contest results will be announced by January 15, 2013.

We look ...]]> Our third annual Poetry Contest is now accepting submissions! We invite all poets to submit their unpublished work online or by mail.

We’re accepting submissions of 2-4 original, unpublished poems as contest entries. Deadline (postmark) for submissions is August 15, 2012.

Read our full submission guidelines and FAQ.

The winner — to be chosen by Ava Leavell Haymon (pictured), author of poetry collections Kitchen Heat and The Strict Economy of Fire — will receive a grand prize of:

• $1,000
• A VIP All-Access Pass ($500 value) for the 27th annual Festival (March 20-24, 2013)
• Publication in Louisiana Cultural Vistas magazine
• A public reading on a literary panel at the 2013 Festival

The top ten finalists will receive a panel pass ($75 value) to attend the 2013 Festival, and their names will be published on www.tennesseewilliams.net.

Entry fee: $20 per entry.

The contest results will be announced by January 15, 2013.

We look forward to reading your work!

For a limited time, we’re offering a 50% discount on all Festival tickets! Offer expires Monday, May 20th at noon (CST). Tickets can be purchased on our website, sasfest.org or by phone at (504) 581-1144. At time of purchase, apply the discount code SINNERS after scrolling to the bottom of the ticketing page.

The full schedule, as well as a complete listing of event descriptions and ticket options, can be found on our website at www.sasfest.org.

Please consider signing up for a volunteer slot during the Saints and Sinners Festival; your helping hand will be invaluable to us. We’ll need:

Ticket takers, site managers, and assistants for the panels, master classes, and special events

Assistants at our box office staff/information desk/concessions

As a token of gratitude for your time and effort, we will offer you a free weekend panel pass ($150 value), which allows access to all literary panel discussions, all reading series sessions, our Glitter with the Literati Welcome Party, and our closing reception/Saints and Sinners Hall of Fame induction.

All we ask is that you commit to working a shift of 4-5 hours during the Festival. And please spread the word on our behalf!

Sign yourself up for a slot on our online sign-up form where you will “order” the time slot during which you will volunteer. ...]]> Limited volunteer slots available!

Please consider signing up for a volunteer slot during the Saints and Sinners Festival; your helping hand will be invaluable to us. We’ll need:

• Ticket takers, site managers, and assistants for the panels, master classes, and special events

• Assistants at our box office staff/information desk/concessions

As a token of gratitude for your time and effort, we will offer you a free weekend panel pass ($150 value), which allows access to all literary panel discussions, all reading series sessions, our Glitter with the Literati Welcome Party, and our closing reception/Saints and Sinners Hall of Fame induction.

All we ask is that you commit to working a shift of 4-5 hours during the Festival. And please spread the word on our behalf!

Sign yourself up for a slot on our online sign-up form where you will “order” the time slot during which you will volunteer. If there is an event you’d especially like to see, please DO NOT sign up to volunteer during that shift, as we cannot guarantee the venue where you will be assigned.

Once you sign up, your shift is your responsibility. Check in 10 minutes before your shift begins in the Royal Salon A at the Hotel Monteleone.

Dress code: dressy casual (no jeans, no sneakers).

Feel free to contact us if you have any questions. We look forward to working alongside you during the weekend of the Festival!

Ticket Code: BookLaunchTh7pm Date: Thursday, May 23 at 7:00 p.m. Price: $35 Location: Bienbille/Iberville Room, Mezzanine Level, Hotel Monteleone

We here at the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival were delighted to celebrate National Poetry Month with our spirited friends on social media. Thank you for all of your tweets, Facebook posts and Instagram pictures of beautiful verse from poets familiar and new. As National Poetry Month draws to an end, we thank you for sharing with us your passion for literature, and for making our 2013 Festival so vibrant and enlightening. Your enthusiasm reminds us to celebrate poetry every day of the year. A little beautiful language goes a long way.

2013 Festival Speaker Niyi Osundare is a force of nature across all genres and media. Best known as a poet, he is also a dramatist, critic, essayist, and media columnist. He has received many prizes, including the Fonlon/Nichols Award for “excellence in literary creativity combined with significant contributions to Human Rights in Africa.”  He is currently a Professor of English at the University of New Orleans.

We sat down for an interview with Niyi Osundare during his office hours. Throughout the interview, various students popped their heads in to say hello. Dr. Osundare’s lectures are always spiced with references spanning from Socrates, Walt Whitman and Chinua Achebe, to Jennifer Lopez, Justin Bieber and PSY. His is a curious and compassionate soul, one that builds friendships across continents — though his entire library of books and manuscripts was destroyed by ...]]>

2013 Festival Speaker Niyi Osundare is a force of nature across all genres and media. Best known as a poet, he is also a dramatist, critic, essayist, and media columnist. He has received many prizes, including the Fonlon/Nichols Award for “excellence in literary creativity combined with significant contributions to Human Rights in Africa.”  He is currently a Professor of English at the University of New Orleans.

We sat down for an interview with Niyi Osundare during his office hours. Throughout the interview, various students popped their heads in to say hello. Dr. Osundare’s lectures are always spiced with references spanning from Socrates, Walt Whitman and Chinua Achebe, to Jennifer Lopez, Justin Bieber and PSY. His is a curious and compassionate soul, one that builds friendships across continents — though his entire library of books and manuscripts was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, his new office is already brimming over with new books sent in by friends all over the globe.    

You’re very passionate about the transformation poetry goes through when it is performed for a live audience. Could you share some more thoughts on that? What does it mean to you that you can perform your poetry for a live audience instead of just having it read in a book?

I come from an oral background. When we talk about oral poetry, we are talking about performance: the performer and the audience. In the African performative situation, there is of course the subject matter you have to sing about or tell a story about. But oral poetry is meaningless without the audience. There is the feeling that whatever you’re about to perform has come from the communal stock, the stock to which the audience belongs. It is like giving back something as you take something from tradition. But tradition is never reproduced wholesale. The individual artist adds her or his own heart to it. In the end, what you have is the combination of the communal stock and the individual performer.

Festivals in celebration of the dead, the harvest, the newborn, the new season — the rainy season, for example — there are all kinds of festivals in the western part of Nigeria, where I come from. There is drumming, there is singing, there is improvisation, constant improvisation. So what we are talking about is total art, or total theater. When I sit down to compose my own poems, all of these situational factors are in the back of my mind.

For me there are two kinds of poems. There are poems that are composed for performance, and there are other poems whose performative potential is not so obvious. When I have an audience in mind, and I have a group of actors or actresses, I put words in the mouths of these different characters. It’s like I’m writing a play. But there are times when I sit down and I am writing a short poem, maybe a blues poem or even some kind of an adapted sonnet. These are not poems that a performer is going to put on, but I still secrete into the lines words that are performance-friendly. Podium friendly.

I started out my life acting, you know; from elementary school through high school and university, and so on up to now. I have written plays, and I am very engaged with the theater. So my own kind of poetry is the kind of poetry that is written by somebody who has invested a lot of time and interest in the stage. I know the architechtonics of the stage. I know how to pace your words in such a way that you would not leave your audience behind. How to organize the rhythm so that the audience will catch your music. How to be conscious, all the time, that when you are reading poetry you are dealing with words in flight. An audience member can never stop you and say, “can you tell us what you just said again?” You must not give them any chance to miss anything.

When I sit down to write, I see my words with my ears. I am very conscious of the oral existence and the aural process of the words.

It’s interesting that you have a strong background in plays. When critics and fans talk about Tennessee Williams as a playwright – what comes up every time is his poetry, his language.

Yes, the two are so closely related. Matthew Arnold talks about Shakespeare, Milton — the most effective words are those that have a certain kind of dramatic potential to them. In the languages that I know, the poets that I have read, and so many parts of world I have been to, I know that the dramatic word often turns out to be the most poetic.

 It doesn’t have to be flamboyant or conspicuous. But there has to be something about its meaning that teases your consciousness, teases your sensibility, in the way that other words do not. Call it the drama of being different, or the drama of meaning and writing differently so that your audience can also hear differently. The economy of means. Particularly when you are dealing with plays, which thrive on the minimalist stage. How to say as little as possible while you mean as much as possible. Call it a rather uncanny exploration of silence.

I remember when we put The Glass Menagerie on stage in Nigeria a couple of years ago, that was what caught my attention about Tennessee Williams, his ability to use the poetry of space so effectively. And it connected very well the African audience.

Take the Noh theater in japan, the Kabuki tradition, the masquerade tradition in Africa, the carnival-esque tradition in South America. Well that is the carnival tradition that has given rise to jamborees that is the Rio Festival, and in the Carribean where you have Calypso festivals every year.

What you are seeing there is a combination of different kinds of poetry. There is physical poetry in the splash of colors. There is poetry of movement, in the way people dance. There is the poetry of music, and then the poetry of poetry, the songs themselves, the words themselves. So in the end what impresses us about these so-called spectacles is difficult to pin down. We can’t really separate one element from the others. It is the totality of it all. And this is what the theater affords us. Shakespeare is such an immortal playwright because of his ability to put poetry in the theater, and theater in the poetry.

Your upcoming poetry panel for the 2013 Tennessee Williams Festival explores the relationship between poetry and place. What kind of places have inspired your poetry? What places do you find yourself going back to through your words?

About three years ago I was invited to a conference on the mountains in Toulouse, France. And that got me writing about mountains, the mountains of the mind. And that took me back to the place of my origin. I was born in Ikere-ekiti, in the western part of Nigeria, a place full of rocks. Huge rocks! Geologists are speculating that there must have been a time when the whole town — or what we now call the town — was part of an extended rock. But because of the natural process of weathering and denudation, there was a depression, and that became the lower area where our town settled. There are many rocks surrounding the city, so everywhere you go, you have to look up. Virtually every book of poetry I have ever written has one thing or other to do with these rocks. Not just rocks in Ikere-ekiti, but everywhere I go I see rocks, and I see them as sisters and brothers of the ones back home.

The Yoruba have a very strong sense of place. It is the home and the environment you consider before you give a child a name. So many Yoruba names are derived from places or natural features. Osundare, for example, my father’s name, comes from the River Oshun, the longest river in the western part of Nigeria. That river is close to our home and it crosses the path to my father’s farm. You don’t talk about where I’m from without talking about that river. It forms a very important part of our family praise name, our panegyric.

We human beings are shaped by the places we come from, but we also have a way of shaping that place in return. There is also the Yoruba philosophy that wherever you go and make a home, that not just becomes a place of abode for you but a place that is entitled to your loyalty.

When I was working on my Katrina poems, that was actually what came to mind. Katrina took everything away. All of these books are new. I lost everything, all my books and manuscripts. In fact, if Katrina hadn’t happened, I would have just given you a book instead of this conversation because all of the things I’m talking about, I was working on my autobiography, about the place I was born and my relationships to other places and other human beings, it took me six years to write. And I had to write about New Orleans as my new home. Not only a home for me, but a home for so many others. What happens to a place like this, with such historical resonance for America and the rest of the world? Why was this place neglected, so carelessly, that it was nearly destroyed?

My mind also kept swinging between here and home. Because every time I see the River Mississippi, I see the River Oshun. When I see the lakes here, I see the lakes in Nigeria. Seven days after the storm — it was the first night I actually got some sleep — we had just been moved to the Red Cross Center in Birmingham, Alabama. A small camp bed. I don’t know how I managed to fall asleep. But shortly after, I fell into a dream. My mother appeared to me in my dream. It’s funny because at this time my mother hadn’t heard what had happened to me.  People were wondering where I was. Because there was communication chaos, she hadn’t heard. Yet she appeared to me in a dream. And she was talking to me. She said, “I know what happened to you. I know what books mean to you.” And then — she knows how to placate me — she went into a family praise name. It’s the longest poem in my collection about Katrina: “What Mother Said: Dream talk, seven nights after the storm.”

Are there other similarities between New Orleans and Yorubaland that echo each other?

There are so many places in New Orleans that I find so similar to places in Nigeria. The architecture, the use of the porch, for example. You build a house in Nigeria, and it doesn’t have a porch, then you don’t have a house.

And the food, the smell of food everywhere. Everyone is laid-back, friendly. And of course the music. Something told me: you’re going to spend a long time here. But I had no idea it would be this long.

As an artist, I often like to be different. This is a city that likes to be different. It is really, really different. People have tried to recreate the New Orleans effect in other cities of America, and it doesn’t work. You can try to be like New Orleans, but I don’t think you could ever be New Orleans. Which is why I felt so protective of this city after the hurricane.  

After you lost everything and had to leave, did you consider just not coming back?

I was in New Hampshire, at Franklin Pierce University as a visiting professor and poet in residence. They were very kind to us. I remember the President asking whether I would like to, and I had a hard time telling him I had to…particularly the morning of the 16^th of January, the morning I left. He looked at me and said, “Must you go?” And I said “Sorry, yes.”

And I can tell you, I was heading back to New Orleans, where I had no home, I had no books, nowhere to stay. Yet we headed back here. This city was dead. Smelly decaying things and animals everywhere. The whole city was swamp. I couldn’t believe it. You had to walk around with a facemask. In January 2006, you had to pick your way gingerly through the mud to enter a classroom.

I felt a sense of obligation to come back to this city. This city and this university, because this university has been very kind to my family. In 1997, we had to bring our daughter to the US, because there were no facilities for her in Nigeria. And it was this university that facilitated that move. They gave me this job, and I was able to bring her and my family. This university supported me in my hour of need. So I shouldn’t desert her; I should support her in her hour of need as well.

I guess it’s that idea of loyalty we were talking about earlier. That a place is entitled to your loyalty.

Yes, that loyalty, yes. The Yoruba hold many values in high esteem. One of them is gratitude; another one is loyalty. The Yoruba don’t really regard you as a full human being unless you have a sense of loyalty.

Places are roads, places are biways, rocks, rivers, paths, and they are death and they are birth. They are bones under the earth and they are places of the newborn. They are gray hairs on the hoary-headed women and men.

And places have their own hold on people. Places are poems, there are many ways we interpret them. There are ways we love them, and there are ways we quarrel with them. Places have lives of their own. Places also have to be protected. If the trees have been so kind in purifying your air, don’t cut them down. If the river provides your water, don’t poison. If the mountains are a feast for your eyes, lifting your mind when you are unhappy, don’t tunnel through it and destroy it. And even the roads, all these things, they have a life of their own.

Call it Wordsworthian mysticism, or whatever. But even before I read Wordsworth, I had all these things from my Yoruba background. Everything has a spirit. And for you to be able to live as a full-bodied wholesome person, you have to allow others to live the same way. Because you are, and because they are.

– By Che Yeun

We have so many delightful memories to choose from. Our Opening Night Gala featured the New Orleans premiere of A Tennessee Williams Songbook: Only a Paper Moon, which enjoyed sell-out shows throughout the weekend. The audience was packed for Those Rare Electrical Things Between People, an intimate reading of Tennessee’s one-act plays. The faithful fans of Tennessee Williams gathered for Tennessee in Others’ Words, a tribute to our namesake playwright through the words of his close friends and witty acquaintances. And we can’t forget the fun we had, cheering and clinking glasses at sold-out events like ...]]> Thank you all so much for joining us to celebrate the 27th annual Festival! Old friends came from near and far to rekindle our shared passion for the arts. We also built new friendships with visitors from as far away as Austria, Brazil, and Wales.

We have so many delightful memories to choose from. Our Opening Night Gala featured the New Orleans premiere of A Tennessee Williams Songbook: Only a Paper Moon, which enjoyed sell-out shows throughout the weekend. The audience was packed for Those Rare Electrical Things Between People, an intimate reading of Tennessee’s one-act plays. The faithful fans of Tennessee Williams gathered for Tennessee in Others’ Words, a tribute to our namesake playwright through the words of his close friends and witty acquaintances. And we can’t forget the fun we had, cheering and clinking glasses at sold-out events like New Orleans Nocturnes, Breakfast Book Club, Auto-Da-Fe, and Sipping on a New Orleans Afternoon.

Missed the Festival? Check out the 2013 Program to see our panels and Master Classes, theater, special events, and more.

Want to get a jumpstart on planning your next Festival? Mark your calendars for the 28th Festival on March 19-23, 2014.