SINE THETA MAGAZINE’S 4TH ANNUAL WRITING CONTEST
Submissions period: 21 May to 18 June 2022
Our upcoming sinθ #24 marks another year of Sine Theta! To celebrate, we are bringing back our summer writing competition for its fourth iteration. We are delighted to announce Jamie Marina Lau (author of Gunk Baby) as this year’s Fiction judge and Yanyi (author of Dream of the Divided Field) as this year’s Poetry judge.
Submit by 18 June 2022 for a chance to be published in sinθ #24 and receive feedback from established writers! Thanks to our Patreon supporters, we’re able to offer more money this year: the winner in each category will receive an $80 USD cash prize.
We’re accepting entries for both fiction (prose) and poetry. We invite you to reflect on the following three prompts as inspiration for your pieces. You may reflect on the prompts separately or as a collective, drawing themes and ideas that resonate with you. Entries must engage with the prompt(s), but can do so either directly or indirectly.
You may only submit one entry per category, so send us your best work!
“日出江花紅勝火,春來江水綠如藍。能不憶江南?” —白居易(唐)
“The sunrise stains the river-flowers redder than fire; springtime makes the river-waters run greener than blue. Who could fail to remember Jiangnan?” ––Bai Juyi (Tang dynasty; trans. Sine Theta staff, 2022)
[Image description: a landscape-oriented image showing a still from a live-action film. It shows the head and shoulders of Hong Kong actor Chow Yun-fat, who is wearing sunglasses and a suit, with gelled-back black hair. He is in an interior space, and the out-of-focus background has patches of color in brown and orange. He is smoking a cigarette and holding a U.S. 100 dollar bill, using the flame from his cigarette to set fire to the bill. The flame is reflected in his sunglasses.]
Email sinethetamag@gmail.com with “Writing Competition - NAME - CATEGORY” as the subject line. Attach your submission as a PDF or Word document, with the document title as “CATEGORY - WORK TITLE”. Do not include your name on the document, as entries will be judged anonymously. If you are entering a poetry and a prose piece, please submit each piece separately via email.
Please include the following completed form with your submission in the body of your email:
Yanyi is the author of Dream of the Divided Field (One World 2022) and The Year of Blue Water (Yale University Press 2019), winner of the 2018 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. His work has been featured in or at NPR’s All Things Considered, New York Public Library, Tin House, Granta, and A Public Space, and he is the recipient of fellowships from Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Poets House. He holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University. He was most recently poetry editor at Foundry. Currently, he teaches creative writing at large and gives creative advice at The Reading.
Jamie Marina Lau is a writer, multidisciplinary artist and the author of Pink Mountain on Locust Island and Gunk Baby. Lau received the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Literature's Readings Residency Award, and was shortlisted for the 2019 New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, the 2019 Stella Prize, the 2019 ALS Gold Medal. She received the title of Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelist in 2019 for Pink Mountain on Locust Island. With explorations focusing on experimental uses of language, Lau's work meditates on a landscape exploring dis-location of culture and space. Lau has previously worked with publications and creative organizations such as Google Creative Lab, Digital Writers Festival (AUS), Visual Editions (UK), Art Gallery of New South Wales (AUS) and Voiceworks (AUS).
Poetry: "Untitled, 2020 (after Ren Hang)" by Alice Liang
Short fiction: "The Wedding Dress" by Celeste Chen
Judged by Chen Chen and Rebecca F. Kuang
Poetry: “etymology of ‘moon’” by Stella Li
Short fiction: “The Girlfriend Place” by Ariel Chu
Judged by Sally Wen Mao and K-Ming Chang.
Poetry: “Self-Portrait as the Dead Fish in Some Guy’s Tinder Profile Picture” by Erin Jin Mei O’Malley
Short fiction: “Auntland” by K-Ming Chang
Judged by Sharlene Teo and Nancy Huang.