Poetry in Motion Community 2020/21 and the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing 2021 – CLOSED FOR SUBMISSIONS

Literature and Verbal Arts (LaVA) at Community Arts Partnership is delighted to open the submissions process for the 2020-2021 Poetry in Motion project.

This year we are excited to announce that with the support of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and of the Heaney family, we will be presenting the seventh Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing to the most outstanding submission through this process.

Each year, Community Arts Partnership publishes an anthology of new writing from poets across Northern Ireland. This will also be our twenty first anthology, and we are opening submissions today, THURSDAY 1ST OCTOBER 2020

Anyone living in Northern Ireland is eligible to make a submission for the anthology by following the guidelines below.

We extend our sincere thanks to the Heaney family for the continued opportunity to offer the awards, in particular Marie Heaney for her warm support and commendation of our LaVA programmes.

Furthermore, we congratulate and applaud our principal funder, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, for the continuing funding support for this award process. As their Head of Literature, Damian Smyth, was quick to point out, ‘The Seamus Heaney Awards, as offered by CAP, are the only awards in the world to carry his name.’ We in CAP are humbled and committed to honouring the trust placed in us and the legacy of our foremost recognised poet, in offering these awards.

Once the selection has been made for the anthology, the selected poems will be presented to a panel which will include representatives from ACNI, the Heaney family, Community Arts Partnership and other members of the local literary community from across the region. The panel will then make the decision as to whom to award this accolade. This represents an exciting opportunity to all new and emerging poets living here, to be recognised for their craft, and can be a springboard to the next stage on their literary career.

The theme of this year’s callout is “Heartland”. This theme, set against the uncertainty and fragility of all that is happening in the world, may embrace and reflect our sense of who and what is important to us, the need to believe in the future and to show our love, our humanity, our thirst for justice, our reliance on healthcare, our celebration of diversity and our commitment to solidarity. Other facets of this theme resonate with resilience, collaboration, and the capacity of the arts to create new possibilities in challenging times, central to the theme of all CAP programming this year, guided by the determination to “Take Heart, Make Art”.

You can read about last year’s award, in the words of the winner, Clare Gallagher, here.

SUBMISSION RULES

We have streamlined our submission rules for this year’s anthology to allow for a more efficient process and ensure fairness where possible.

Download the Poetry in Motion Community 2020/21 submission template pdf (save to your computer)

1. The title of the printed anthology will be ‘Heartland’. You are invited to reflect on our theme in your poem, but please avoid the title Heartland for your poem.
2. All Submissions must be made electronically, marking the subject line of your email ‘Poetry in Motion Submission.’
3. Submissions must be made either:
   1. Typed in Word-compatible documents and emailed to submissions@capartscentre.com meeting the exact format below or
   2. Download our ‘Submission Template’ pdf to your computer, paste or type in your poem, save and rename the pdf to the TITLE of your poem and then email to: submissions@capartscentre.com
   3. Formatting:
      Poems must be no more than 35 lines long (including line/stanza breaks) and no more than 75 characters per line (a character can be a letter, number, space or any keystroke).
   4. If you paste your poem into the official ‘Submission Template’ pdf, you will be unable to fit in lines which contain more than 75 characters, so please adjust your lines accordingly so that your poem is not disqualified.
4. If you are submitting more than one poem (you may submit up to 3), you should attach each poem in a separate document. Each attachment should be saved as the poem title e.g. ‘The River.pdf’. Please do not use the title ‘CAP submission, or ‘Submission’ – we can only accept documents which are the title of your poem. If your name appears on the poem or in the name of the document, it will be disqualified.
5. Poems previously published must not be submitted. Work that has appeared online for any reason is considered to have been previously published and should not be submitted.
6. Late submissions will not be accepted under any circumstances
7. In the body of the email, you must provide your name, address with postcode, phone number, email address, a list of the titles of your attached poems and include the statement:

Please find my poems attached
Name: Jane Brown
Address (in one line only): 251 Haiku Gardens Ballytown BT20 20XX
Phone number: 0777777777
‘I hereby verify that my poems are my own original work and has/have not been published elsewhere’

PLEASE NOTE that if you do not include this information in your email, in the form indicated above, your poem will be disqualified.

8. No more than three submissions per person are permitted. If you submit more than three, none will proceed to the selection process.
9. We cannot accept requests for changes or edits after you have made your submission, so please ensure it is correct before you click send.
10. If your submission does not address all of the criteria/formatting listed above correctly, CAP reserves the right to automatically disqualify your submission.
11. Do not make simultaneous submissions to other potential publishers i.e. work that has been submitted or is being considered elsewhere, should not be submitted.
12. You must live in Northern Ireland (we will verify your address should your poetry be selected)
13. By making a submission, you grant permission for Community Arts Partnership to publish the poems submitted in the forthcoming anthology and retain publishing copyright. All individual copyright rests with the poet.
14. By making a submission to the anthology, you also automatically grant permission for your work to be considered for the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing, if selected for the anthology (hence our wish to have poems submitted without names etc to assist the integrity of that selection process).
15. Please keep a copy of your poems as we are unable to return them or to enter into any correspondence regarding your work subsequent to submission.
16. Copyright remains with the poet; however, if your work is published by Community Arts Partnership you must credit us in any future anthologies or collections in which your work appears stating that the piece was first published by Community Arts Partnership and giving the name of the publication and the year in which it was published.
17. Community Arts Partnership reserves the right to make reasonable minor adjustments and/or suggestions prior to publication such as typos or formatting irregularities. In some editorial cases, poets may be contacted to ascertain adjustments.
18. If you have any queries about Poetry in Motion Community, The Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing or the submission process itself, please contact the Literature and Verbal Arts (LaVA) coordinator Shelley Tracey:  shelleyt@capartscentre.com OR steven@capartscentre.com (for the submission process).