Miriam Chaikin Endowment Fund

The Miriam Chaikin Endowment Fund Writing Award was established in 2016 in memory of Miriam Chaikin, a longtime Westbeth resident, former Westbeth Artists Residents Council Literary Arts Chair, and prolific writer. For Miriam, the written word and the book were essential to her life and well-being. It is in her memory that we seek to honor a member of the writing community, especially those writers who live in Westbeth.

AWARDEES

2017

Christina Maile, prose and Carol Hebald, prose
Carol Hebald A former Writing Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has since published the novella collection, Three Blind Mice (Unicorn Press, 1989), the memoir, The Heart Too Long Suppressed (Northeastern University Press, 2001); and more recently four books of poetry: Delusion of Grandeur (2016), Colloquy (2015), Spinster by the Sea (2005), and Little Monologs (2004). Her novel of which excerpts the will read, A Warsaw Chronicle,i spublished by from Regal House Press.
Christina Maile, a former landscape architect and co-founder of the Westbeth Playwright Feminist Collective, has received for her printmaking work a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, and a Joan Mitchell Studio Grant. Her work is in the database of the Brooklyn Museum Feminist Collection and in the White Columns Registry, as well as numerous living rooms. Read Christina Maile Stories for Chaikin 2017

2018

Joan Hall, poetry, Kelly Nicole Long, poetry, and Joyce Yaeger, prose
Joan Hall’s collages and assemblages have been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. Joan illustrated “The Policeman’s Beard Is Half-Constructed”, the first book ever written by a computer with a program called Racter and published by Warner Books.Joan has also been writing poetry since she was 8. She is presently illustrating a book of her own poetry.
Kelly Nicole Long was born and raised in Jacksonville, FL where she both attended and taught in Catholic schools. The politically fraught Floridian landscape, along with her experiences in Catholic institutions inform her artistic practice. Long earned a MFA in Visual Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2016). Her interdisciplinary practice encompasses ceramics, installation, and writing.
Joyce Yaeger was head of PR for The New York Public Library, She is a graduate of Syracuse University and started her career as a reporter for the Syracuse Post-Standard.Today she lives in Midtown East with her partner Danielle of 11 years, and two cats, none of which write fiction.

2019

Jack Dowling, prose and Elizabeth Lash, poetry
Jack Dowling was a “country” boy from New Jersey when he moved to New York City to attend Cooper Union, where he studied with Robert Gwathmey and Morris Kantor.Jack’s early work as a painter was in abstraction, but his artwork later took a new direction, with compositions inspired by photos of family and friends.In the nineties, Jack turned to writing for creative expression. His stories have been published in the Hamilton Stone Review, the Barcelona Review, A&U magazine, American Writing, and CreamDrops. Read Jack-Dowlings Story Richard
Elizabeth Lash is a NYC-based attorney who has written on a variety of subjects—from art law and ex-KGB agents to women engineers and corruption in Azerbaijan. Her poetry has appeared twice before at The Five-Two, and her non-fiction articles have been published by the Center for Art Law, the Holy Cross Journal of Law and Public Policy,

2020

Suzanne Ruta, prose and Matthew Corey, poetry
Suzanne Ruta discovered from the outset, her wonderful neighbors at Westbeth, including many who, like her husband, the painter Peter Ruta, had come to New York as emigrants from Europe, just before the Second World War. She has published two books, a story collection, Stalin in the Bronx, in 1987 (NY Times notable book of the year) and a novel, To Algeria with Love, in 2011. Both books deal with immigrants and exiles. Her winning story, WYSIWYG, set in the mid- 1990s, celebrates the vicissitudes of a refugee from Nazi Germany who finds a home in downtown New York. Read Suzanne Ruta WYSIWYG
Matthew Corey is a writer living in New York. His work straddles poetry and prose, and sometimes when writing in one thinks he is more leaning towards the other. He was a runner-up for the 2015 Lascaux Review Short Story Prize, has been published in The Opiate, Two Cities Review, and Travel-tainted: Turtle Point Press Review. Read Chaikin-award-Matthew-Corey-10poems

2021
Christina Maile, prose and Fran Markover, poetry
Fran Markover’s poems have been published in journals including Rattle, Calyx, Able Muse, Karamu, among others. She was one of the finalists for the Henry Morgenthau III First Book Poetry Prize for mer book, How Soft the Letting Go. And she has a chapbook, History’s Trail, published by Finishing Line Press. She has been a poetry residentat the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Read Poetry-Fran-Markover
Christina Maileis a printmaker, writer and landscape architect. She grew up in Bed Stuy and belonged to a gang called the Halsey Bops. A past winner of the Miriam Chaikin Writing Award, she was Queen Elizbeth in the West Indian Day Parade when it was produced in Harlem. Read Christina Maile Stories Chaikin 2021

2022
Cassandra Long poetry Jeffrey Solomon Prose
Cassandra Long is a writer, painter, and illustrator based in Brooklyn, New York. Many of her stories are inspired by working with kids as a schoolteacher in both Boston and New York City. She is currently at work on a children’s book about her time as a teacher, as well as a book of illustrated stories titled Me Imagining Holding a Baby While Imagining Dropping the Imaginary Baby While Still Holding It.
Jeffrey Solomon’s coming out and coming of age memoir, The Tourist, is his first work of long-form prose. He is currently finishing up his MFA in creative writing at Goddard College. He is the founder of Houses on the Moon Theater Company (HOTM); the playwright and director of Houses’ productions of Building Houses on the Moon and De Novo (59E59 Theaters and Next Door at NYTW); and the playwright of Tara’s Crossing (Tenement Theatre).

2023
Susan Stenson Prose and Lynne Spigelmire Poetry
Susan Stenson is a retired ophthalmologist, who spent her nearly five-decade career at NYU-Langone Medical Center, where she was involved in patient care, clinical research, and teaching,
with a special emphasis on Medical Ethics and Public Health. She is based in Manhattan and has had a lifelong interest in writing and literature. Read Susan Stenson The Good Doctor

Lynne Spigelmire Viti has two full-length poetry collections, The Walk to Cefalù (Cornerstone Press, 2022), Dancing atLake Montebello (Apprentice House, 2020), two poetry chapbooks, Baltimore Girls (2017) andThe Glamorganshire Bible (2018) and a short story collection, Going Too Fast (2020), the latter all from Finishing Line Press. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in over 150 online and print
journals. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Westwood, Massachusetts, earlier this year. Read Lynne Viti- Poems for 2023miriam-chaikin-writing-award_ 15 poems

2024

Sheena Daree Romero Prose and Thom Brucie Poetry
Sheena Daree Romero is an essayist, humorist, and doodler based in New York City. Her
stories and essays have been published in Autostraddle, Taco Bell Quarterly, Split Lip Magazine,
and elsewhere—and featured on the Longreads Best of 2022 list. She’s working on an essay
collection that bridges memoir and cultural criticism to meditate on blackness in disparate
locations.
Thom Brucie’s novel Children of Slate won the 2023 bronze medal Illumination Award for excellence in Catholic literature, and his novel Obsidian Mirth won the American Writing Award
in fiction (2022). His poetry chapbook Moments Around the Campfire with a Vietnam Vet was
named the best chapbook of 2010; his chapbook Apprentice Lessons contains a grouping of
poems dedicated to the dignity of labor. He has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, and
his short stories and poems have appeared in a variety of journals, including the San Joaquin
Review, Cappers, the Southwestern Review, Pacific Review, Wilderness House Literary Review,
North Atlantic Review, and many others.
Dr. Brucie is retired Professor of English and Professional Writing at South Georgia State
College. You can find out more about Thom Brucie at: www.ThomBrucie.com
READ Thom Brucie Miriam Chaikin Award-winning poetry

How to Apply
Every year in December there is a Call for Entries, which is published on the Westbeth website and E-Blasted to the general public.

Writers are invited to submit short stories, excerpts from longer works of fiction or creative nonfiction, plays, screenplays, or poetry. Works for review should not exceed 5,000 words. Authors will retain full copyrights to their works.

For poetry:
Limited to submission of 15 poems of your choosing (rather than whole book).

For prose:
5,000 words. If extracted from a longer work, we request a brief synopsis to frame the excerpt.

Submissions can be either published or unpublished manuscripts. Writers are encouraged to submit works that have not previously been submitted to this competition. All submissions will have the author’s name and any identifying information redacted, and the submissions will be read by a review panel composed of friends and family of Miriam’s as well as the Westbeth Artists Residents Council’s Literary Arts Chair.

Award
The winner of the award will receive $500 from the Miriam Chaikin Endowment Fund and a reading of their work. (Because of the pandemic, public readings of works have been cancelled.)

About Miriam Chaikin
Born in Palestine, Miriam/Molly/Chickie, as she was known, grew up in Brooklyn, and her childhood memories and life in a close-knit Jewish community are all themes represented in her writing. She worked earlier in her career as an editor of literature for young people, and most of her books are intended for children and youth. Her works include lushly illustrated retellings of Old Testament lessons, humorous stories of the misadventures of “Molly and Yossi” (based on her childhood and that of her beloved younger brother Joseph), and collections of poetry. The last two books she completed were for adults – Jewish Wisdom for Daily Life and Jerusalem: An Informal Autobiography of the City.