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The Chapter One Fiction Competition and Reading Series is an annual competition and reading series, open to residents of New York City, that provides opportunities for emerging novelists to share their work with an audience, while emphasizing the importance of a strong first chapter.

Guidelines and Requirements

The Bronx Writers Center is seeking first chapters from unpublished novels and works-in-progress, written by authors in the five boroughs of New York City. No more than five selections will be made, and those writers whose chapter one has been chosen will receive a $1,000 honorarium and be invited to give a reading.

Chapter One is on hiatus for 2009-2010

2009 Chapter One Winners

Native New Yorker Laura Buchwald is a freelance writer and editor and a graduate of Lafayette College, where she earned her BA in English and French. She has written for various magazines, and worked as a reporter for the New York Post's “Page Six”.

Laura is currently a manuscript editor with a focus on memoirs. October 2008 saw the publication of Living in the Woods in a Tree, a memoir she edited about the late country singer Blaze Foley. She has ghostwritten one novel. Wanderlust is her first foray into her own long-form fiction.

Shell Fischer, a Brooklyn-based writer, received her MFA in Writing & Poetics from Naropa University, where she studied with such beat-generation writers as Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Hubert Selby Jr., Anne Waldman, and Bobbie Louise Hawkins. Her writing has been read on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition and has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Confrontation, Apostrophe, Nebo, and Coffee & Chicory, among other journals. She recently completed her first novel, The Joy of Mom, about the Sexual Revolution as seen through the eyes of a 10-year-old girl. She holds a BA in journalism from Michigan State University and has written as a journalist for more than 15 years, winning several top journalism awards in Virginia.

Jason Michael Martin's writing has been featured in the journals Hotel AmeriKa, Alt-X Magazine, The Art Bureau, Cherry Bleeds, and others. He is the screenwriter of 37 to 401 a short film screened at The UC Berkeley Art Museum/ Pacific Film Archive and Ocularis in Brooklyn.

He recently completed his first novel, Chevy Nova Scotia. He lives in New York City and works at the performing arts center The Kitchen.

Photo: Courtesy of Julie Comfort, Comfort Studio

Laura O'Connor Vernikoff has lived in three of New York City's boroughs but she particularly loves Queens, where she grew up and where her novel, A Thing So Small, takes place.

She has also lived in Baltimore, where she earned her undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins' Writing Seminars, and central Pennsylvania, where she received a Master of Education from Penn State. She currently lives in the Bronx and teaches middle school in Manhattan.

2008 Chapter One Winners

Mai Hoang was born in Vietnam and raised in northern California. After graduating from the University of California, Davis, she became a newspaper reporter. Since 2001, she has lived in New York City, working as an editor at magazines such as Ms. and World Press Review. She also edits the Asian-American online journal called TripmasterMonkey.com. She is working on a Vietnam War novel entitled The Testimony of Mr. Dao (its first chapter was a winning entry in this competition).

Marie Holmes was raised in a bunch of places, but mostly in Portland, Oregon. She has been living in New York for a while now, and earned an MFA at Sarah Lawrence College. Her stories have appeared in the Coe Review, Blithe House Quarterly and The Los Angeles Review (forthcoming.) She received the 2006 Gival Press Short Story Award. She currently lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her partner and pays her half of the rent by teaching Spanish to New York City high school students.

Darleen Lev spent three years teaching English in South Korea, an experience that helped her to develop an outsider’s view of American culture. Teaching writing to international students at Parsons the New School for Design has kept this perspective close, inspiring aspects of her novel-in-progress, The White Girl, the first chapter of which was selected for “Chapter One”. Bad Wind, Good Wind, a short story set in Korea and published in Chelsea was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has been awarded residencies at Yaddo and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. In addition to teaching and working to complete The White Girl, Lev works as an interior decorator.

Suzan Sherman's fiction has appeared in The Mississippi Review, American Short Fiction, BOMB, and the anthology Lost Tribe: Jewish Writers on the Edge (HarperCollins), among others. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Observer, BOOKFORUM, BOMB, and The Forward. She has been awarded grants for her fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Jerome Foundation, and fiction fellowships from the Ucross Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, and Ledig House, among others. She is completing her first novel, Pearl O'Shea.

Jessica Sticklor is a recent graduate of The New School with a degree concentrating in creative writing. She has been an editor for The Muse Apprenticeship Guild, The Olive Tree Review and The Castalia Project online zine, which was her brief attempt at founding a literary journal. After college she interned at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency and is currently an MFA student at City College in New York. She has been previously published in The Northwest Herald, The Riverwalk Review, The Mini-Mag, Release, City Writers, Children, Churches and Daddies, Birmingham Words, Open Wide and The Hawai'i Pacific Review. A recent story of hers was a finalist at the Summer Literary Seminars Kenya Contest and she has been asked to perform at Earshot, a prestigious poetry reading series out of Brooklyn, New York.

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