Skip to content
WFNS logo ltrmark sticky 100px
WFNS logo ltrmark sticky 100px

Ellemeno
Visual Literature Prize

paint brush

The Ellemeno Visual Literature Prize is an annual celebration of creative cross-pollination between the literary arts and the visual arts.

The winning writer or artist receives a cash prize ($250) along with digital publication and a featured interview on the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia website.

For questions about this program, contact program lead Andy Verboom at communications@writers.ns.ca

Established in 2023, the Ellemeno Visual Literature Prize recognizes creativity that reaches across the formal divide between contemporary literary arts and visual arts, accepting both literary submissions (that respond to, incorporate, or creatively ‘translate’ visual artworks) and visual submissions (that respond to, incorporate, or creatively ‘translate’ literary works).

The Ellemeno Prize was established in recognition of textile artist Marilyn Smulders, who made significant contributions to Nova Scotia’s literary landscape during her tenure as Executive Director of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia (WFNS) from 2017 to 2023.

The prize is named for Marilyn’s screenprinting and quilting moniker, Ellemeno.

Assessment of all eligible submissions is conducted by volunteer jurors drawn from WFNS’s staff, board, and Writers’ Council as well as other member organizations of the Cultural Federations of Nova Scotia. Jurors are selected for their expertise in creating, evaluating, and/or publishing both literary and visual artworks.

Uniquely among WFNS programs and awards, eligibility for the Ellemeno Prize is thematic:

  • Eligible literary submissions (fiction, creative nonfiction, or poetry) are those that respond to, incorporate, or creatively ‘translate’ one or more visual works created by any artist who is not the submitting writer (e.g., a short story depicting the creation of a film, a personal essay whose central metaphor is a quilt created by a family member, or a series of poems exploring a painting).
  • Eligible visual submissions (craft, drawing, illustration, installation, painting, photography, printmaking, sculptural / plastic art, textile art, or video art) are those that respond to, incorporate, or creatively ‘translate’ one or more literary works created by any writer who is not the submitting artist (e.g., a photograph staged to represent a passage from a novel, a series of illustrations added beside or overtop of printed text, or a sculpture formed by folding or cutting a book).

The terms ‘response,’ ‘incorporation,’ and ‘translation’ should be understood as expansive and inclusive. For instance, interactive artworks that perform real-time ‘translation’ of a participant’s input (from textual to visual or from visual to textual) are also welcome. Please contact us (at communications@writers.ns.ca) if uncertain whether your particular literary or visual work would meet the prize’s theme.

Sonja Boon

2025 Ellemeno Visual Literature Prize

See At Sea (Casket Cloth and Mourning Shawl) & read our interview with Sonja Boon

Sonja Boon is a mixed race writer, researcher, flutist, and teacher based in Kjipuktuk. Her memoir, What the Oceans Remember: Searching for Belonging and Home, appeared in 2019, and she has published nonfiction, poetry, and fiction in a range of journals, including Riddle Fence, Room, Geist, Pinhole Poetry, and Unlost as well as in anthologies. She is passionate about life stories and the myriad ways these stories emerge: from traditional diaries, letters, and memoirs to archival ephemera. Her work attends to the relationship between text and textiles and to the ways that women’s lives have historically been stitched rather than written.

2025 finalists:

  • Doretta Groenendyk for the painting We Just Swim, which responds to Bonnie Tsui’s Why We Swim (Algoquin Books, 2021) and a musing by surfer and activist Dave Rastovich: “We forget our bodies as we know them and we just… swim.”
  • Jamie Samson for the poetic sequence Still, Life., which responds to three paintings—each, in Jamie’s words, “reflecting on a particular part of the working person’s day”: John Brack’s The Breakfast Table (1958); Salvador Dali’s Living Still Life (1956); Antoine Vollon’s Mound of Butter (1875-85).

Shannon Webb-Campbell

2024 Ellemeno Visual Literature Prize

Read "Her Eros Restored" & our interview with Shannon Webb-Campbell

Shannon Webb-Campbell is of Mi’kmaq and settler heritage. She is a member of Flat Bay First Nation. Her books include Re: Wild Her (Book*hug, forthcoming 2025), Lunar Tides (2022), I Am a Body of Land (2019), and Still No Word (2015), which was the recipient of Egale Canada’s Out in Print Award. Shannon is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick and the editor of Visual Arts News Magazine.

2024 finalists:

  • Hilary Briar for The Garden of Love (multiflora rose thorns and wood glue), which translates the final line of William Blake’s poem “The Garden of Love” (1794) — that is, “…binding with briars my joys and desires….” — into binary code, representing each ‘0’ or ‘1’ with a locally foraged rose thorn curving either downward (for ‘0’) or upward (for ‘1’).
  • Darryl Whetter for “When Silence Isn’t So Accurate” (nonfiction), which responds to the architectural work Rothko Chapel (1971), designed by Philip Johnson, Howard Barnstone, and Eugene Aubry and housing site-specific paintings by Mark Rothko. The essay weaves memoir and art history into a reflection on love.
Submission Guidelines

1113 Marginal Road

Halifax, NS B3H 4P7

902 423 8116

contact@writers.ns.ca

Privacy Policy

 

Instagram Facebook Bluesky Youtube
Menu

Operational Investors

The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia is based in Kjipuktuk, in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq People. This territory is covered by the “Treaties of Peace and Friendship,” which Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) Peoples first signed with the British Crown in 1725. The treaties do not deal with surrender of lands and resources but in fact recognize Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) title and establish the rules for an ongoing relationship between nations.

© Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia, 2025. All rights reserved.

Scroll to Top
WFNS logo ltrmark sticky 100px

Simultaneous Submissions

The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia (WFNS) administers some programs (and special projects) that involve print and/or digital publication of ‘selected’ or ‘winning’ entries. In most cases, writing submitted to these programs and projects must not be previously published and must not be simultaneously under consideration for publication by another organization. Why? Because our assessment and selection processes depends on all submitted writing being available for first publication. If writing selected for publication by WFNS has already been published or is published by another organization first, copyright issues will likely make it impossible for WFNS to (re-)publish that writing.

When simultaneous submissions to a WFNS program are not permitted, it means the following:

  • You may not submit writing that has been accepted for future publication by another organization.
  • You may not submit writing that is currently being considered for publication by another organization—or for another prize that includes publication.
  • The writing submitted to WFNS may not be submitted for publication to another organization until the WFNS program results are communicated. Results will be communicated directly to you by email and often also through the public announcement of a shortlist or list of winners. Once your writing is no longer being considered for the WFNS program, you are free to submit it elsewhere.
    • If you wish to submit your entry elsewhere before WFNS program results have been announced, you must first contact WFNS to withdraw your entry. Any entry fee cannot be refunded.

Prohibitions on simultaneous submission do not apply to multiple WFNS programs. You are always permitted to submit the same unpublished writing to multiple WFNS programs (and special projects) at the same time, such as the Alistair MacLeod Mentorship Program, the Emerging Writers Prizes, the Jampolis Cottage Residency Program, the Message on a Bottle contest, the Nova Writes Competition, and any WFNS projects involving one-time or recurring special publications.

Recommended Experience Levels

The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia (WFNS) recommends that participants in any given workshop have similar levels of creative writing and / or publication experience. This ensures that each participant gets value from the workshop⁠ and is presented with information, strategies, and skills that suit their career stage. The “Recommended experience level” section of each workshop description refers to the following definitions used by WFNS.

  • New writers: those with less than two years’ creative writing experience and/or no short-form publications (e.g., short stories, personal essays, or poems in literary magazines, journals, anthologies, or chapbooks).
  • Emerging writers: those with more than two years’ creative writing experience and/or numerous short-form publications.
  • Early-career authors: those with 1 or 2 book-length publications or the equivalent in book-length and short-form publications.
  • Established authors: those with 3 or 4 book-length publications.
  • Professional authors: those with 5 or more book-length publications.

Please keep in mind that each form of creative writing (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and writing for children and young adults) provides you with a unique set of experiences and skills, so you might consider yourself an ‘established author’ in one form but a ‘new writer’ in another.

For “intensive” and “masterclass” creative writing workshops, which provide more opportunities for peer-to-peer feedback, the recommended experience level should be followed closely.

For all other workshops, the recommended experience level is just that—a recommendation—and we encourage potential participants to follow their own judgment when registering.

If you’re uncertain of your experience level with regard to any particular workshop, please feel free to contact us at communications@writers.ns.ca