
Submissions	Subscriptions	Competition	Endowment	Contact Us

Arts & Letters endowments fund the $1,000 prizes in our annual competition, including the Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Nonfiction.

Each year four prize winners are published in Arts & Letters. The prizes also offer an opportunity that’s rare among literary competitions: Our winners attend (expenses paid) special programs in their honor on the GCSU campus and in the Milledgeville community, where they also give a public reading of their work.

If you would like to know more about the Arts & Letters endowments and how you can help, please contact Martin Lammon at the Arts & Letters office, or if you prefer, contact him directly at his office phone (478-445-3508) or office email (martin.lammon@gcsu.edu). If you would like to make a gift, just open and print the gift form. Please make checks payable to Georgia College & State University Foundation (GCSU Foundation).

Susan Atefat-Peckham

1970-2004

The Arts & Letters Rumi Prize in Poetry and the Susan Atefat Prize in Creative Nonfiction.

The Arts & Letters/Rumi Prize in Poetry was named for the great Persian poet in honor of our late friend and colleague Susan Atefat-Peckham, poetry editor and professor in the GCSU MFA program from 2002-2004. Of Iranian heritage, Susan was a deeply spiritual woman who loved Rumi’s poetry. Her National Poetry Series Award-winning book That Kind of Sleep opens with a quote from Rumi, translated by the American poet Coleman Barks (who is a member of the Arts & Letters editorial advisory board).

Thanks to a generous gift from Susan’s parents, Bahram and Fari Atefat, the Arts & Letters/Susan Atefat Prize in Creative Nonfiction was also endowed.

Susan and her six-year old son Cyrus died tragically in a February 2004 car accident while she was living in Jordan on a Fulbright fellowship. Even though she was only 33 years-old, she had accomplished so much as a poet and as a mentor to her students and friends in poetry.

Learn more about Susan’s life, her work with Arts & Letters, and our current poetry prize competition.

To make a gift, follow the link below, print the gift form, and send with your gift to the Arts & Letters office.

Print the Gift Form

Would you like to attend our fall and spring prize events? Visit the GCSU Creative Writing Program’s Visiting Writers Series calendar page.

Arts & Letters

Campus Box 89

Georgia College & State University

Milledgeville, GA 31061

(478) 445-1289

al@gcsu.edu

Arts & Letters accepts submissions from September 1 to March 1 (postmark deadlines). For complete information, see submission guidelines.