The Chattanooga Writers’ Guild (CWG) is including a new category for the 2021 Annual Writing Contest this spring. And I have been invited to serve as contest judge in this category: Food-related Piece + Recipe. For this category, CWG invites you to submit a complementary recipe with your food-related story or poem. (Recipes will not be part of the judging process.) If your piece is chosen for our anthology, your recipe will be published, as well! Photos of your dish are accepted but not required. For more details to enter, see our website However, as contest judge, I will say a few things that I will be looking for:
Food, as in a meal, must be a prominent feature in the creative writing whether it serves as a metaphor or as a trigger of memories. I am not looking for a recipe in verse, though it might work in rare occasions.
I have included an Excel spreadsheet which shows some of my food-related work that has been published and possibly easily accessible. (One piece that is not easy to access is attached here. It is the braided fictional essay, “Bouillabaisse,” which weaves a recipe with a provocative interlude.) The highlighted work might serve as particularly good examples of what I might look for, but your own creativity is important to me.
Additional information about me is in this short bio:
John C. Mannone, a food connoisseur and poet, is from a long tradition of Sicilian and Argentinian cuisine, and believes food is another form of poetry. His literary work appears in North Dakota Quarterly, New England Journal of Medicine, Baltimore Review, as well as in Foreign Literary Journal, The Acentos Review, Riddled With Arrows, and many others for food-related creative works. He is often called to lead workshops and serve as a contest judge—he was the celebrity judge for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (2018). A Jean Ritchie fellow in Appalachian literature (2017), he has won prizes in poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction. For more information about his thoughts on food and poetry, see the recent Facebook blog article for Grace Writers, as well as his links to some food-related creative works on his website, The Art of Poetry.
John C. Mannone: The Art of Poetry 