Thanks to the generous support of anonymous donors, the American Boccaccio Association holds an annual prize competition, with awards in three categories:

·      The Giuseppe Velli Graduate Prize will be awarded for the best graduate student essay on a subject related to the life or works of Giovanni Boccaccio. The prize of three hundred dollars ($300) will be assigned to a graduate student enrolled in any American or Canadian University, or by a recent graduate who earned an M.A. or Ph.D. during the year prior to submission. The winning essay will also be automatically considered for publication in Heliotropia, a forum for Boccaccio research and interpretation (http://www.heliotropia.org/).

·      The Giuseppe Velli Undergraduate Prize of two hundred dollars ($200) will be awarded for the best essay submitted by an undergraduate student in any American or Canadian University, or by a recent graduate who earned a B.A. during the year prior to submission.

·      The Giuseppe Velli Creative Prize of two hundred dollars ($200) will be awarded for the best creative work, performance, or translation related to Boccaccio’s works by a graduate or undergraduate student in any American or Canadian University. Materials can be submitted as digital recording or other media file.

Submissions for the 2024 Velli Prizes are now open. Authors should provide a cover sheet containing the author’s name, email, mailing and email addresses, the title of the essay/project/performance, and institutional affiliation. The author’s name should not appear on the essay’s title page or elsewhere in the submission. Quotations from Boccaccio’s works should be cited in the original language, and the format of the essay should conform to MLA Style Sheet guidelines.

Send all submissions as PDFs (cover pages and essays) or digital media files (creative works) to velli.prize@gmail.com. The essays should be no longer than 7500 words, including bibliography and other related material. The deadline for submission, for all categories, is June 1, 2024.

All submissions will be judged by a committee appointed by the President of the ABA. The committee will consist of a Chair, one member of the ABA executive, and one other member of the ABA. The results will be announced to our members and published in the following issue of the ABA Newsletter. All submissions remain the intellectual property of their authors.