Creative Expos are one of the premier ways that ZO connects with artistic talent around the world. 2024 is ZO’s 10th Anniversary and we will run several Creative Expos. Our Cover Art, Poetry & Literature EXPO is now in progress with winners each month through the end of the year. The O.D.D. Room EXPO (connected to our developing film project) will start on New Year’s Eve 2024.
DECENNALIA COVER ART, POETRY, & LITERATURE EXPO
NOW IN PROGRESS
PARAMETERS
Terms and policies (“Parameters”) for ZO’s creative expos are general and meant as a guideline for those entering. All submissions are subject to these Parameters and should be read and reviewed before entering, as everyone entering is subject to them. If you disagree with the Parameters of the expo, please do not enter.
ZO is a community of artists with a growing vision. We invite you to fully explore the creative offerings presented by our different kind of Universe. You will gather as you read through our content, that we are not a typical business, as usual, type — hence, most of our outreaches and creative expos have a certain unique tilt. ZO is an experiment in human artistic connection with the high concept of building respect between people, cultures, and creative disciplines while working to promote peace through the arts
All “Free” first entries are paid for by Artitude, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit arts organization. Submission fees for additional entries allow us to offer the awards. Fees also help with costs for the expos and support our mission to broaden positive artistic communications between diverse people around the world.
Parameters are subject to change and will be announced on this page. All submissions are subject to these parameters and any changes made.
Expo Parameters . . .
ZO’s creative Expos are designed as expository contributions to our expanding community of artists and authors. As such, the goals are not only to find the creative piece judged best — but also to reveal the wealth of work that we receive. We have worked hard to provide clear guidelines regarding the Expos and we continually evolve and improve, clarify, and enhance our communications to accurately evaluate and fairly present content.
Creative Submission, Evaluation, and Selection.
Most of our Expos run for three to four months, but 2020 began a very unusual worldwide drama. The worldwide pandemic that we all dealt with and continuing global issues have changed access, especially for young artists in high school and college, who are usually a large part of our constituency. Our Expos are open to anyone over the age of 13 from anywhere in the world. Of course this is subject to your own unique regional, country, direct, or local authorities.
We are generally extending the time durations for our Expos to offer more time for consideration. It is certainly our feeling that creativity, art, thoughts, and life in general, could stand to be a bit slowed down and more fully enjoyed. During the term of the Expo, content is assessed and rated by a diverse group of evaluators who compile a blind top tier of finalists to be forwarded to Expo Judges. The Judges then rate the blinded submissions with numerical ratings. Those numerical ratings are then averaged, and winners are chosen based on these mathematical calculations.
Per our developing tradition, we may formulate a schedule from other top-tiered entries for feature and publication and post that schedule. Awards must be claimed within 30 days of notification. If our email (with notification of the award) is not responded to within thirty (30) days, the award will be donated to charity. All awards are in U.S. dollars.
We consider our awards a kind of honorarium for great work. We do not ask for exclusivity to publish the works, nor do we need anything other than a photo for art entries. For video entries, we ask that those be published on YouTube and we judge from the already published work. Literature and Fiction writing must be your own. If you use AI to create your written piece, please indicate this at the end of the document. Because ZO encourages creativity, our most treasured works are those from their creator’s own mind and experience, so if you are using ChatGPT to create your submission to us, we are not the best outlet for that.
Again, we do not need exclusive rights to publish submitted work and creators of submitted works retain rights to their original work. We keep an archive of winners and continue to highlight work sent in (of course with proper credit), so we do ask that you send us non-exclusive work with the understanding that we may publish the work in perpetuity. Winners of the Decennalia Literature Expo may be asked for permission to publish their work in ZO’s upcoming printed magazine.
Our awards are intended as a token of our appreciation and celebration of your work. For some entering, the awards may cover no more than a nice dinner with friends, for others it may buy books, (dependent on where you are in the world — help with rent), etc. ZO is connected to a broad array of international creatives and we are mainly hoping to inspire and provide an enjoyable place for sharing.
We have found a lot of the entries we receive to be quirky, avant-garde, often excellently precise and other times deliberately abstract — and there are simply only “subjective” rulings for such when weighed together. The very talented global community that we now reach, and decisions on winners, have been very close and are subject to the broad tastes of our diverse community. That said, we have determined that all of our viewers and the large constituency of artists that we deal with are all eligible to enter any of the Expos. We debated whether we should allow past winners to enter and have, for the moment, decided that “yes” past winners may enter all Expos. We believe our diverse constituency of evaluators, along with the blind judging does yield a fair, mathematically derived winner — so if you win 4+ years in a row — congratulations.
