Would you like to join us in The Lodge next year?

Cozy up in your chair and read more below!

The Lodge opens for new submissions every spring semester. Any current Blackburn College student is eligible to submit their own original creative writing and visual art for online publication in The Lodge. All submissions are read anonymously by our team of student editors in Blackburn College’s Literary Publishing course, who decide together which pieces are granted admission to The Lodge. Illustrations for the Lodge are created by student artists in Blackburn College’s Illustration course.

Creative writing pieces submitted to The Lodge may also be entered to win cash prizes in the Louise Allen Creative Writing Contest each spring. Started in 1994 with a generous donation from long-time Blackburn friend Louise Allen, the Louise Allen Creative Writing Contest is intended to support and encourage the creative writing community on campus and reward excellence in all creative writing genres. The contest is open to all students and is read anonymously by external judges.

This year’s judges were Jennifer Moore for poetry and Cris Mazza for prose.

Jennifer Moore was born and raised in Seattle. She is the author of Easy Does It (The University of Akron Press, 2021), The Veronica Maneuver (The University of Akron Press, 2015), and a chapbook of centos, Smaller Ghosts (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Bennington Review, Tupelo Quarterly, DIAGRAM, The Cincinnati Review, Interim, and elsewhere. A professor of creative writing, she currently serves as Director of the School for the Humanities and Global Cultures at Ohio Northern University and lives in Bowling Green, Ohio.

Cris Mazza has 19 titles of fiction and literary nonfiction including her most recent book, It’s No Puzzle, a memoir in prose and pictures. Other notable titles include her first novel How to Leave a Country, which won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award for book-length fiction, and the critically acclaimed Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? She is director of the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Full submission guidelines for both The Lodge and the Louise Allen contests will be available when submissions reopen next spring. In the meantime, follow us at The Lodge on Facebook and @the_lodge_bc on Instagram, and sign up for our email list below!