Aesthetica Creative Writing Award Call for Entries Countdown: Dianna Henning

There is one month left to submit poetry and short fiction to the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. Dianna Henning was longlisted for the most recent Award with her poem Between Young and Old Time, published in the Award’s Annual along with 53 other writers selected by the judging panel. Henning holds a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has published in: Crazyhorse, The Lullwater Review, Poetry International, Fugue, Swink, The Asheville Poetry Review, South Dakota Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review and The Seattle Review.

She taught creative writing for California Poets in the Schools, through the William James Association’s Prison Arts Program and through several California Arts Council grants, and was a participant in a California Humanities Stories Grant. Recent publication acceptances include Canary, an on-line environmental review; Blue Fifth Review’s, Notebook Series; The Main Street Rag; Psychological Perspectives, a quarterly journal of Jungian thought; The Kerf, College of the Redwoods; Lummox and the Clackamas Literary Review.

Between Young and Old Time

I am reading a book loaned to me by a very old woman.
Her hands are on the pages and they are slipping into mine;
flesh of a book against my brow as I close my eyes to rest.

What I love best about this book recommended by an old woman,
is how a single strand of silver hair becomes my bookmark—
between two pages, a single strand of hair tells where I left off.

Where I left off is not where I am or where I intend to be.
Further into the book than ever imagined is a story about being
an old woman who reads a book and recognizes herself

in a character. The old woman looks out from the book,
an old woman’s eyes large as an oasis and clear as sunlit sand.
Her hand is a vine of many veins that intertwine and signal something.

Something close and dear as song expresses itself on her lips.
She is sipping lyrics from the air through the straw of a strand of hair.
Her hands are on the pages and they are slipping into mine.

To see more of Dianna Henning’s work visit www.diannahenning.com.

Enter the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award at www.aestheticamagazine.com/creativewriting. Entry is £10 and permits the submission of two works into one category. Submissions close 31 August 2014.

Prizes include publication; a consultation with a fiction agency and a poetry organisation; £500 prize money for each category winner; a selection of books courtesy of Vintage and Bloodaxe Books, and a subscription to Granta.

Credits
1. Courtesy of Aesthetica.

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