Announcing: 2nd Unpious.com Submission Contest

Update – Monday, May 23, 2011: The Unpious.com Submission Contest is now officially closed. We received many excellent entries which have been published or will be published over the next few weeks.

However — we still have just enough chasidish blood in us to relate to rules and deadlines very vaguely. So, if youstill haven’t submitted, take a chance and submit anyway within the next week. If we haven’t yet finished reviewing all entries, we will gladly add yours to the pile. Here is your last chance to get in your submission! Get it in soon for it to be included for consideration for the contest and its accompanying prize and honors.

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Readers and Friends –

I am proud to announce what many of you have surely been waiting for: the second Unpious.com Submission Contest.

Like last year’s contest, we are accepting entries in both fiction and non-fiction (please indicate which it is!). We know there are some good pieces already in the works by some of our regular contributors, and we hope many others will take this opportunity to show what they’ve got. Competition submissions are also automatically considered for standard publication. The regular submission guidelines apply here as well, so make sure to read them carefully before submitting.

The submission deadline is Sunday, May 22, 2011.

The contest will have two prizes awarded. First Prize will be $200, awarded solely by our panel of judges. Second Prize will be $100, to be awarded by reader votes. Honorable Mention will be awarded to the runner-up of the voting tally.

That’s right: one part of the contest, the First Prize winner, will be judged solely by a panel of distinguished judges who, as fans, supporters, and notable writers themselves (well, at least two of them are), have graciously agreed to share of their time and energy to assess the submissions.

I am now proud to introduce our esteemed judges: Anouk M., Jeremy Dauber, and yours truly, Shulem Deen.

Anouk M. was raised in a Satmar home, breaking from the fold when she was nineteen to avoid an arranged marriage and to pursue a secular education. Her first novel, Pur Coton (“Pure Cotton”), written in French, was published by Gallimard. Her forthcoming novel, I Am Forbidden, written in English, spans three generations of a fictional Satmar family, from pre-WWII Szatmár, Transylvania to Paris to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Anouk M. has an undergraduate degree from Columbia, an architecture degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a PhD in Romance Studies from Cornell. She now lives in New York City.

Jeremy Dauber grew up in an Orthodox family and spent a year in yeshiva in Israel before going on to earn an undergraduate degree from Harvard College and a Phd in Yiddish Studies from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. Jeremy is the Atran Associate Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture in the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University and the author of Antonio’s Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature and co-editor and co-translator of Landmark Yiddish Plays, an anthology.

Shulem Deen (a/k/a Hasidic Rebel) is the founding editor of Unpious.com and has been writing the Hasidic Rebel blog since 2003. He is a former Skver Hasid, raised in Borough Park, Brooklyn, and New Square, N.Y. His articles have appeared in Brooklyn Rail, Nerve.com, and other publications. He now lives in Brooklyn and is at work on his first book.

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