By JOHN SIMMONDS
Hays Post
The Hays Arts Center is preparing to host its 46th annual Creative Writing Contest for area students. The contest is open to all students grades K-12 within Ellis County and will have two categories for each grade: prose and poetry.
HAC Executive Director Brenda Meder told Hays Post entries will be accepted from public, private and home-schooled students and will be judged by instructors from the Fort Hays State University English department. There will be awards for first, second and third places in each category at each grade level.
Submissions are due at 4:30 p.m. March 13. Winners will be honored at an April 27 award ceremony in the Robbins Center on the FHSU campus. According to Meder, submissions can come from individuals, but most will come from teachers who have chosen their students’ strongest work to submit to the competition.
“Because it has become a very popular project, some years back we did limit the amount of submission to 15 for each section of language arts that an instructor taught. So if it was a third-grade classroom instructor they could submit 15 entries in prose and 15 entries for poetry. If it’s a middle school teacher who has three sections of seventh-grade students, he or she could submit 15 prose and/or 15 poetry for each of those seventh-grade classes.”
Submissions must be turned in on paper, not submitted electronically. The following guidelines and competition specifics were sent to area teachers:
1. Each entry from sixth- through 12th-grade is to be written on computer. ** Following Notification – the winning 6th through 12th Grade entries must be sent electronically to the Hays Arts Council by the deadline of Tuesday, April 8. So, to save the need to retype, remind students to save their entries electronically until after the judging.
2. Please avoid submitting multiple entries on a single topic or similar formula. The judges may tend to dismiss “canned” or formulaic entries if they see multiple copies on the same topic.
3. Any entry that has already been published or won an award in any other competition is NOT eligible for submission. HOWEVER, a work currently in submission to another project (but not yet recognized, awarded, or published) IS eligible for submission to our project.
4. Each student must sign a release form (a copy is attached, copy more as necessary), which will be numbered as is the entry, acknowledging it and attesting to its originality. The school’s chair will retain this form and send only the numbered entry to the Hays Arts Council.
5. To help students avoid plagiarism, please screen the entries carefully to insure the originality of the work.
6. Limit prose entries to 1,250 words. All 6th through 12 grade entries MUST include a final “WORD COUNT” noted at the end of their electronically submitted work. Because of printing costs and judging considerations, we must adhere to the word limit. Entries without a “word count” or discovered to be longer than 1,250 words may be eliminated from consideration and/or recognition.
7. All entries should be “proofed” and free of mechanical errors. In the past, many fine endeavors did not make the final cut because they contained serious mechanical errors.
8. Entries must be submitted by 4:30 pm, Thursday, March 13 to the Hays Arts Council,
112 E. 11th – separated by grade and divided into prose and poetry categories.
9. Keep in mind – ANY works written anytime this school year are eligible.
10. The copy of the prose or poetry entry submitted for judging WILL NOT be returned.