The Mary Roberts Rinehart Awards
The Mary Roberts Rinehart National Award series is temporarily suspended. The Creative Writing department regrets this decision, but felt it necessary to protect the endowment that funds the awards.
The Mary Roberts Rinehart George Mason University Student Awards, however, are still up and running. If you are a George Mason University student and would like more information on the student awards, please Click Here.
The Awards: To help aspiring authors, the
family of the late Mary Roberts Rinehart began a number of
years ago awarding small grants to writers whose work showed
particular promise. These grants were given to honor Ms. Rinehart,
a writer of fiction and nonfiction whose work was popular
in the earlier decades of the 1900s. In 1983, the Rinehart
family established The Mary Roberts Rinehart Fund at George
Mason University to finance annual grants to promising writers.
Currently, three grants of $2,000 each are awarded in spring
for the best nominated manuscript in fiction, in nonfiction,
and in poetry.
Eligibility: Grants are made only for unpublished
works by writers who have not yet published a book or whose
writing is not regularly appearing in nationally circulated
commercial or literary magazines. An unpublished work is defined
as one that has not appeared in any venue generally accessible
to the public, either in printed or electronic form. Works
for which writers have received publishers' advances are not
eligible for a Rinehart Award. Writers may seek a grant in
only one category (fiction, nonfiction, poetry) in any given
year; an author not granted an award one year may apply in
succeeding years but once a writer receives an award, he or
she may not apply for another, even in a different genre.
Grant recipients are not required to be United States citizens
but only works in English will be read, and awards are made
only in U.S. dollars.
Nominations: Writers seeking grants must
be nominated by someone in the field--another writer, an agent,
an editor or the like. No forms are required. Candidates for
grants in fiction and nonfiction should submit a freestanding
entry, such as a short story or a self-contained section of
a book. No entry in fiction or nonfiction should exceed 30
pages. Candidates in poetry should submit 10 pages of individual
or collected poems. The decisions of the judges are based
on the quality of writing evident in the submitted manuscript.
Candidates should submit the nominating letter, two copies
of the manuscript, and a brief autobiographical statement
in one envelope. Candidates should write on the envelope the
genre in which they are seeking a grant. Manuscripts will
not be returned.
Address: Submit entry packets to:
Mary Roberts Rinehart Awards
English Department
MSN 3E4
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030-4444
Deadlines: All entry packets are due to the English Department office by 4pm on March 6, 2008 . Manuscripts received without
nominating letters and manuscripts received late will not
be read. Grants will be announced in April
on the awards web page. Candidates
who wish to receive a printed announcement should submit a
#10 SASE.
Inquiries: Anything not covered here, address
to Jennifer Hostler or William Miller at the Rinehart Awards
address, or by phone at 703/993-1180, or by e-mail to jhostler@gmu.edu.
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