RECENT WINNERS: FOOD 

Heather A. McDonald won the $1000 Prize for Best Essay about Food for "How to Fix Everything," her first published work.

McDonald was 4 years old when she tasted her first casserole, a comfort food provided by family friends after the death of her grandfather. In her winning essay, she reflects on the heavy, microwavable food that defined her childhood and the emotional escape she later found in following the recipe's step-by-step instruction. 

A former Food & Wine intern, McDonald currently resides in Washington, D.C., where she teaches creative writing and composition at American University. Her teaching, she says, has become increasingly entwined with her own writing--"How to Fix Everything" was written in response to a prompt originally assigned to her students.

Pushcart Prize-winning writer Deborah Thompson received the $500 Runner-Up Prize for Best Essay about Food for "Beefless," a story of new beginnings, in which several middle-aged women team up at Curves to rework their bodies, rethink their diets and restart their lives.

Thompson teaches English at Colorado State University, where she helped develop a new master's degree in creative nonfiction. She is interested in the way that food is simultaneously political and personal, intimate and global, and consequently, she finds that her main writing themes--the environment, animal rights and mortality--often coalesce in her food writing. Currently, she is working on a memoir and a collection of essays.

Read both winning pieces, and a slew of other tasty tales, in Creative Nonfiction #41.

ON MEMOIR: Margaret Robison--mother of Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors) and John Elder Robison (Look Me in the Eye)--releases The Long Journey Home, the third book on the family's saga. NPR interviews Lee Gutkind about the discrepancies between the three, and what it really means for a memoir to be "true."   

IN PUBLISHING: William Zinsser contemplates the pressures of publishing and the wrong reasons to write a book. Plus, VIDA releases a breakdown, by gender, of writers published in the Best American series, and the female writers included weigh in on the numbers.

FROM WRITERS: AT&T Tech Channel posts a video interview with Lee Gutkind, in which he discusses robotics, immersion writing and how he researched for Almost Human: Making Humans Think. The Daily Record interviews CNF MFA Program-Off winner Sonya Dunning about "for(e)closure," her winning essay about the demolition of her childhood home, to appear in CNF #42. Plus, Dartmouth College English professors discuss how their own writing is reinvigorated by their students and Edwidge Danticat bids farewell to The Oprah Winfrey Show.

TRUE CRIME 

Postmark Deadline: September 30, 2011

For an upcoming issue, Creative Nonfiction is seeking new essays about true crimes--detailed reports of premeditation, follow-through and aftermath, whether gleaned from police blotters or the news, passed down as small-town legend or family lore, or committed in cold blood.

We want true stories of petty theft, identity theft, embezzlement or first-degree murder; of jaywalking, selling (or maybe buying) weed or assault; of crimes and punishments and unsolved mysteries. Think "The Devil in the White City" (Larson), "In Cold Blood" (Capote) and "Iphigenia in Forest Hills" (Malcolm); or "Half a Life" (Strauss), "Lucky" (Sebold) and "The Night of the Gun" (Carr). If it's against the law and someone--maybe even you!--did it anyway, we want to know all about it.

Creative Nonfiction editors will award $1,000 for Best Essay.

Essays must be unpublished, 4,000 words maximum, postmarked by September 30, 2011, and clearly marked "True Crime" on both the essay and the outside of the envelope. View our complete submissions guidelines here.

BOOK PROJECT: BECOMING A NURSE

Postmark Deadline: November 30, 2011

Creative Nonfiction is seeking essays by and about nurses for a new book, Becoming a Nurse: Real Stories of Nurses, Their Lives, and Their Patients.

Becoming a Nurse will present readers with the world of medicine from the perspective of nurses in hospitals, in-home care programs, long-term care facilities, hospices, and the armed forces as they tell stories that recall and recreate the most salient moments of their careers.

We are looking for writers who can write dramatically and vividly about the profession. Essays can range from 2,500-5,000 words but should be written in a narrative form, with scenes, description, vivid characters and a distinctive voice.

GENERAL

Accepted Year-Round

We are always on the lookout for true stories, well told, about any subject. For complete guidelines and to view other upcoming CNF issues and contests, please visit us online.

The Best Creative Nonfiction Box Set $30   

Includes The Best Creative Nonfiction Vols. 1, 2 & 3  

The easiest way to catch up with your reading this summer is to get the best, all in one place. 

The Best Creative Nonfiction collections are a crash-course in the genre, with selections taken from literary magazines and presses, online publications, blogs and some other unlikely sources. With true stories about everything from jail food to competitive eating, pack rats to rubber ducks, they showcase the tremendous variety and potential of the genre.

Get all three, this month only, and save almost 40% off the cover price.  

For more information on each volume's table of contents, visit us online. 

The CNF Daily Twitter Contest is one more way to get your work into CNF. Check out our top 6 tweets in #41 and participate daily for the chance to be published in an upcoming issue!

Still not sure what we're looking for? Here are a few recent winners, to serve as examples and inspiration:

MAY 26 

inthemilk I leave myself an accidental voicemail. The kid chatters, I laugh, the fridge hums. We are strange, delightful. I press 9 to save. #cnftweet

MAY 12 

artmercenary "Being struck by ground lightning has its benefits," she pauses for either effect or coffee, "I've never slept better." #cnftweet   

MAY 6

mroshaugh A guest complains of stomach pains and stumbles into the lobby, collapsing at the freshly buffed shoes of an unnerved doorman. #cnftweet

MAY 4 

devakali He roams the block with an army blanket wrapped tight round his shoulders: a dusty soft shelled turtle, or burnt out superhero. #cnftweet

All of the past winners are available on our profile page under the "Favorites" tab.