ASU Magazine conducts inaugural alumni writing contest

<p>Sharpen your pens, fire up your laptops, tap excitedly on your iPads – do whatever you need to do to prepare yourself for <em>ASU Magazine</em>’s inaugural alumni writing contest. <em>ASU Magazine</em>, the quarterly magazine of Arizona State University and the ASU Alumni Association, is hosting its inaugural alumni writing contest this fall.</p><separator></separator><p>The contest, open to all graduates of ASU, will begin Sept. 1 and end Nov. 1. Two lucky winners (one each in the fiction and nonfiction categories) will have their entry published in the March 2011 issue of <em>ASU Magazine</em>. For those whose writing is limited to Twitter “tweets” and Facebook status updates, there also is a Briefly Speaking category, which will seek the best writing that can be done in less than 140 characters. Ten of the best Briefly Speaking entries will be published in the March 2011 issue.</p><separator></separator><p>Contestants must submit entries as Word documents (.doc or .rtf files) by e-mailing them to <a href="mailto:ASUMagazineWritingContest@asu.edu&quot; target="_blank">ASUMagazineWritingContest@asu.edu</a>. In addition to being published in <em>ASU Magazine</em>, winners of the fiction and nonfiction categories also will receive a prize package of ASU-themed goodies.</p><separator></separator><p>Winners will be selected by judges who are ASU faculty members or alumni. Judges for fiction are Peter Turchi, an award-winning author and director of the Piper Writing Center at ASU, and Jewell Parker Rhodes, who is artistic director for Piper Global Engagement at ASU, as well as the author of six novels and a memoir. Nonfiction judges are Bill Konigsberg 2005 M.F.A., an award-winning journalist who has written for television, newspapers, wire services, and the Internet, and Paul Morris 1975 B.A., director of the Master of Liberal Studies degree program in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and an accomplished writer and teacher of creative nonfiction.</p><separator></separator><p>For detailed information on the contest and to view the official contest rules, visit <a href="http://alumni.asu.edu/get-involved/writing-contest&quot; target="_blank">http://alumni.asu.edu/get-involved/writing-contest</a>.</p&gt;