Contests
Dappled Things currently holds two annual contests, the J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction and the Jacques Maritain Prize for Nonfiction. The prizes have no entry fee and winners receive cash awards and publication in the journal.
J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction
“One foot in this world and one in the next”: that was how J.F. Powers described the Midwestern priests he wrote about in his fiction. Having one foot in another world can be awkward, and Powers’ characters are known not for their graceful mysticism, but for the humiliating and mordantly entertaining stumbles they make while trying to live their faith. We’re looking for carefully crafted short stories with vivid characters who encounter grace in everyday settings—we want to see who, in the age we live in, might have one foot in this world and one in the next.
Jacques Maritain Prize for Nonfiction
Dappled Things honors the best essays published in the journal in a year through the Jacques Maritain Prize for Nonfiction. Maritain was an influential 20th century Thomist philosopher and Catholic convert whose work covered a wide range of topics, including metaphysics and epistemology, ethics and politics, and—significantly for us—literature and art. His book Art and Scholasticism has been a major influence on Dappled Things' own approach to aesthetics.
The Sacred Heart Art Competition
Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is one of the most widespread and beloved Catholic practices, one that has its origins as far back as the eleventh century, and which has been most explicitly promoted since the 17th century after the mystical visions of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. However, despite its venerable history and the countless graces which the faithful have received through it, few (if any) artistic depictions of the Sacred Heart could be counted among the great works that exist within the treasury of Catholic sacred art. Dappled Things is issuing a challenge to artists to create new images of the Sacred Heart that, with God's help, will help more of the faithful enter ever deeper into this devotion.
Past Contests
The Bakhita Prize for the Visual Arts, 2020
Headlines by Oluwatobi Adewumi
Bakhita Prize Winner, 2020
As a Catholic arts magazine, we find ourselves wondering what we can bring to the table during our country's current crisis. The shocking death of George Floyd has shaken not just the United States but the whole world, reminding us starkly of how far we still are from seeing each other's infinite dignity as children of God.
Most tragic of all is realizing that, if Floyd’s death has led to a great societal outcry, it is because he is only one among so many who have lost their lives in similar circumstances. Like many others, we are asking ourselves questions of how to respond to violence and the violation of human dignity, including persistent racial violence that has been directed especially against the black community.
Dappled Things is calling on visual artists to help us see more clearly: to help us honor and highlight the infinite worth inherent within each victim of racial violence. To do so, we are establishing the Bakhita Prize for the Visual Arts, which will be awarded for a photograph, painting, illustration, or sculpture that helps us better see the humanity and God-given worth of victims of racial violence. Saint Josephine Bakhita, after whom the prize is named, was a Sudanese slave brutalized by her captors, who later became a religious sister renowned for her joyfulness, gentleness, and charity. Today she is the patroness of Sudan and survivors of human trafficking.
The Kierkegaard Poetry Competition, 2022
We are pleased to announce the winners of the Søren Kierkegaard Poetry Competition, having received several hundred submissions for the contest.
Congratulations to first-place winner Hugh Savage for his poem “The Wreck of the København” and to Paul J. Pastor for his second-place poem “That Which Cannot Rest Content.” We’d also like to congratulate our four third-place winners: Jesse Keith Butler for his poem “Lightning Strikes Churches,” Nadine Ellsworth-Moran for her poem “Stealing Figs While on Holiday in Greece,” Fr. Stephen A. Gregg for his poem “Two-Step,” and Matthew Salyer for his poem “From the Papers of One Still Living.”
The award is for a poem of not more than fifty lines inspired by the writings of Søren Kierkegaard to be published in an anthology in honor of Rev. Ronald F. Marshall (1948-2021) who served as pastor at First Lutheran Church of West Seattle and taught theology at NW Theological Union. Marshall was a prolific reader and brilliant teacher, known for his community activism on behalf of the hungry and homeless. He also a published two major books on Søren Kierkegaard: Kierkegaard for the Church and Kierkegaard in the Pulpit: Sermons Inspired by His Writings.
All of the winning poems, as well as 34 others which were accepted for inclusion in the anthology, will be published in anthology from Wiseblood Books, in collaboration with the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Saint Thomas in Houston and sponsored by Music Northwest.
We’d like to thank Dappled Things for organizing the contest and we’d also like to thank everyone who submitted a poem. We look forward to sharing the published anthology soon.