2012 SAN FRANCISCO BOOK FESTIVAL SET FOR UNION SQUARE

SAN FRANCISCO _ The 2012 San Francisco Book Festival will hold the outdoor portion of its annual competition honoring the best books of the spring season at Union Square on Saturday, May 19.
Union Square is a cosmopolitan plaza bordered by Geary, Powell, Post and Stockton Streets in the heart of downtown San Francisco. It is surrounded by stores, hotels and a theater district, making it one of the largest shopping and tourist destinations in the world. Publishers, authors and other vendors interested in being a part of this special opportunity should email SanFranciscoBKFest@sbcglobal.net to obtain an exhibition space registration form and more information on the outdoor event.
The 2012 San Francisco Book Festival will consider non-fiction, fiction, biography/autobiography, children's books, compilations/anthologies, teenage, how-to, cookbooks, science fiction, audio/spoken word, history, wild card, gay, photography/art, poetry, unpublished, travel and spiritual works. There is no date of publication deadline.
Our grand prize for the 2012 San Francisco Book Festival is $1500 cash and a flight to San Francisco for our gala awards ceremony and day festival on Saturday, May 19.
Submitted works will be judged by a panel of industry experts using the following criteria:
1) General excellence and the author's passion for telling a good story.
2) The potential of the work to reach a wider audience.
ENTRIES: Please classify your book and enter it in the following categories. Multiple entries must be accompanied by a separate fee for each book.

·  General Non-fiction

·  General Fiction

·  Children's books

·  How-to

·  Spiritual

·  Photography/Art

·  Gay

·  Poetry

·  History

·  Teenage

·  Biography/Autobiography

·  Audio/spoken word

·  Compilations/Anthologies

·  Best Unpublished Short Story

·  Cookbooks

·  Science Fiction

·  Wild Card

In addition to honoring the top selections in the above categories, The San Francisco Book Festival will award the following chosen from submissions:
1) Author of the Year- Honors the outstanding book of the competition.
2) Book Design of the Year - Honors outstanding and innovative design.
3) Publisher of the Year- Honors the top publisher based on materials displaying
excellence in marketing and promotional materials, as determined by our judges.
FESTIVAL RULES: San Francisco Book Festival submissions cannot be returned. Each entry must contain the official entry form, including your e-mail address and contact telephone number. All shipping and handling costs must be borne by entrants.
NOTIFICATION AND DEADLINES: We will notify each entry of the receipt of their package via e-mail and will announce the winning entries on our web site (www.sanfranciscobookfestival.com). Because of the anticipated high volume of entries, we can only respond to e-mail inquiries.
Deadline submissions in each category must be received by the close of business on April 25, 2012. Winners in each category will be notified by e-mail and on the web site. Please note that judges read and consider submissions on an ongoing basis, comparing early entries with later submissions at our meetings.
TO ENTER: Entry forms are available online at sanfranciscobookfestival.com or may be faxed/e-mailed to you. Please contact our office at 323-665-8080 for fax requests. Applications must be accompanied by a non-refundable entry fee of $50 in the form of a check, money order or PayPal online payment in U.S. dollars for each submission. Multiple submissions are permitted but each entry must be accompanied by a separate form and entry fee.
Entry fee checks should be made payable to JM Northern Media LLC. We're sorry, but entries must be mailed and cannot be delivered in person or by messenger services to the JM Northern Media offices.
Entry packages MUST include:
1) One copy of the book;
2) A copy of your official entry form or a reasonable facsimile;
3) The entry fee or receipt for online payment;
4) Any press/marketing materials you wish to send. Marketing is used as a tie-breaking consideration by our judges.
Entries should be mailed to:
JM Northern Media LLC
attn: San Francisco Book Festival
7095 Hollywood Boulevard
Suite 864
Hollywood, CA 90028-0893
AWARDS: The San Francisco Book Festival selection committee reserves the right to determine the eligibility of any project.
The 2012 San Francisco Book Festival is part of the JM Northern Media family of festivals, which include the DIY Convention: Do It Yourself in Film, Music & Books, New York Book Festival and Hollywood Book Festival.

Earnest Hemingway's Son to Present Bard Pen Award

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—Bard College writer in residence Teju Cole has won the 2012 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for a distinguished first book of fiction for Open City. Patrick Hemingway, the son of Nobel Prize–winning writer Ernest Hemingway, will present the prestigious literary award to Cole on Sunday, April 1, at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.

“Written in a deceptively quiet voice, Teju Cole’s remarkable and penetrating debut novel achieves what Kafka said art should; it chops the frozen sea within us,” said novelist and Hemingway Foundation/PEN award judge Andre Dubus III. In addition to Dubus, writers Sigrid Nunez and Edith Pearlman were judges for this year’s Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.

Teju Cole will receive a $10,000 prize from the Hemingway Foundation and PEN New England, as well as a residency in The Distinguished Visiting Writers Series at the University of Idaho’s MFA Program in Creative Writing. Cole and competition finalists and honorable mentions receive Ucross Residency Fellowships at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, a retreat for artists and writers. The late Mary Hemingway, the wife of Ernest Hemingway, founded the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in 1976 to honor her husband and draw attention to first books of fiction. Past recipients of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award include Edward P. Jones, Marilynne Robinson, Ha Jin, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

Teju Cole is a writer, art historian, and street photographer. Born in the United States in 1975 to Nigerian parents, he was raised in Nigeria and currently lives in Brooklyn. Besides Open City (Random House, 2011), Cole is the author of a novella, Every Day Is for the Thief (Cassava Republic Press, 2007). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Qarrtsiluni, Chimurenga, New Yorker, Transition, Tin House, and A Public Space, among other publications. He is currently at work on Water Has No Enemy, a nonfiction narrative of Lagos, and on Small Fates. He received his B.A. in studio art and art history from Kalamazoo College in Michigan; his M.A. in African art history from the University of London; and his M.Phil. in 16th-century northern European visual culture from Columbia University, where he is working on his Ph.D. He has taught art history and literature at Hofstra University, New York University, and Columbia University. He has received a Rudolf Wittkower Fellowship and Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities (awarded by the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation), and has been interviewed for the documentary film, Wole Soyinka: Child of the Forest.