The 2012 recipient of the Victoria A. Hudson Emerging Writer Scholarship at the San Francisco Writers Conference is Poet Anna-Marie McLemore of Sacramento, California. Ms. McLemore is a grand slam winner, whose fiction and non-fiction entries were also blind selected for top honors in the annual writing contest. Ms. McLemore is a 2011 Lambda Literary Fellow in fiction. Her work has appeared in numerous Cleis Press anthologies.
Runners up included fiction writer Katrina Anne Willis, of Starkville, Mississippi, and non-fiction writer Rebecca Beyer of San Francisco, California.
Ms. McLemore will receive a registration credit to attend the 2012 San Francisco Writers Conference February 16 – 20th. (Pre/post conference events and Speed Dating with Agents are not included.) All three will receive a one year Sunshine membership to the San Francisco Writers University online community.
This is the fourth year Victoria A. Hudson has sponsored a scholarship to the San Francisco Writers Conference. Initially restricted to MFA students, for the 2011 conference the competition was opened to any emerging writer. This year, due to a small number of entries, the genres were combined into one competition.
Each year, submissions include two pages of a written, unpublished work and a short essay responding to the prompt “I write because…”. Finalists are selected genre neutral based upon the quality, clarity, and depth of the essay. The writing samples are used to further differentiate the quality of each writer’s work. Reading is done blind with no identifying information available until after entries are ranked and finalists selected. For the 2012 scholarship there were a total of 18 submissions across the three genres.
The submission period for the 2013 Victoria A. Hudson Emerging Writer SFWC scholarship is September 1 – December 1, 2012.
Vicki Hudson 