Katherine Paterson award open to entries

Hunger Mountain is the Fine Arts journal of Vermont College. They're seeking entries for the Katherine Paterson Prize for YA and Children's Writing. The details:

What is the Katherine Paterson Prize for YA and Children’s Writing?

An annual prize for writing for children. A chance for your writing for children to be read by Hunger Mountain editors and guest judges!

What will the winner receive?

One overall first place winner receives $1,000 and publication!
Three runners-up receive $100 each. We choose one runner-up from the YA (young adult) entries, one from the Middle Grade entries, and one from the Picture Book or Writing for Young Children entries.

Click here to see all their contests, and to enter.

Then what? Carrie Jones essay on Hunger Mountain

Hunger Mountain is the literary journal of Vermont College, and it's a really enjoyable read for the likes of us. Check out Carrie Jones's essay on why she writes fantasy:

It’s all Bigfoot’s fault. I wanted to find him. Every day when I was a kid, I’d rush through my homework, breeze through a call to my mom at work, gobble up my snack, gulp down my apple juice, and head to the woods in my backyard.

Then I’d be incredibly quiet.

I was hunting, you see. Only I didn’t have a gun. (Not that I would have used it, anyway. I was one of those kids who read Charlotte’s Web and became a vegetarian because, well, what if all pigs were like Wilbur, and they could really talk and feel?)

Fortified by meat-free spaghetti leftovers, I’d head to the woods, glassy-eyed, breathing as inaudibly as I could. I tried to walk with quiet, rolling my feet inwards as I stepped in a straight line, moving like a fox. The wind whipped my hair. The maple leaves fell down. The cars on the highway zipped by, but I ignored them all. I was on a quest for Bigfoot.

Yes, Bigfoot, the man-beast of the Washington woods, that smelly recluse, subject of horror movies. I, Carrie Elizabeth, would find him in my backyard in Bedford, N.H. I would find him and … and … and …

Then what? I wondered.

That’s the question that still always gets me: Then what?

Read the rest.

Sundee Frazier excerpt on Hunger Mountain

The good news: You can read an excerpt of Sundee's new book at Hunger Mountain, the Vermont College journal.

The bad news: You'll have to wait till next year to read the rest of THE OTHER HALF OF MY HEART.

Meanwhile, the rest of the children's/YA lineup at Hunger Mountain is incredible: Katherine Paterson, Carrie Jones, Tim Wynne Jones, Janet S. Wong and more.