41st Annual Literary Arts Festival Writing Competition

Please encourage your students to submit their work to the 41st Annual Literary Arts Festival Writing Competition! Students may submit their work at: 
https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/literaryartsfestival/submission-guidelines/

And, save the date for the 2022 Literary Arts Festival featuring Layli Long Soldier on March 24th, 4:30 to 6:30 pm on Zoom.

Layli Long Soldier is an Oglala Lakota poet whose 2017 Whereas received many accolades and awards–including being selected as a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry and winning the National Book Critics Circle Award. Here is the description of Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas by her publisher:

“WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. ‘I am,’ she writes, ‘a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.’ This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.”