Our Summer 2023 Contest will open from June 1 - July 31, 2023.

Judges

fiction

Lydia Conklin has received a Stegner Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, three Pushcart Prizes, a Creative Writing Fulbright in Poland, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, a Creative Writing Fellowship from Emory University, work-study and tuition scholarships from Bread Loaf, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, Djerassi, the James Merrill House, and elsewhere. Their fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, The Paris Review, One Story, and VQR. They have drawn cartoons for The New Yorker and Narrative Magazine, and graphic fiction for The Believer, Lenny Letter, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. Last year they served as the Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Fiction at the University of Michigan and they are currently an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Vanderbilt University. Their story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, was published by Catapult in North America and Scribner in the UK.

poetry

Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is a writer and visual artist. He is the author of two poetry collections: the full-length collection Common Grace from Beacon Press, and Ubasute, which won the 2020 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition. His honors include a MacDowell Fellowship, a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry, a St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award in Literature, and nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets anthologies. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Plume Poetry, Poetry Daily, RHINO, Pirene’s Fountain, Iamb, upstreet, Verse Daily, DMQ Review, Poet Lore, The Night Heron Barks, and elsewhere. He currently serves as a member of the Slapering Hol Press Advisory Committee and as a reader for Beloit Poetry Journal. His paintings have appeared in galleries throughout Connecticut, including Chester Gallery, the John Slade Ely House, Westport Arts Center, and City Lights Gallery in Bridgeport. Aaron earned his MFA in creative writing from Boston University and is also the author and illustrator of Text, Don’t Call: An Illustrated Guide to the Introverted Life (TarcherPerigee).

information & guidelines

Our fiction winner and poetry winner will each receive an award of $300 and publication in our fall issue. Finalists will also be announced and considered for publication.

In order to keep this contest as accessible as possible, our entry fee is $8 per submission.

All submissions will be considered for publication in our fall issue, even if they are not chosen as contest winners.

Authors are welcome to make multiple separate submissions, each with a submission fee.

We will read all submissions blind, so please do not include any identifying information within your document.

We will only consider original, previously unpublished work. Work that has previously appeared elsewhere, including blogs or personal websites, will not be considered.

It is always our mission to support and lift up the voices of marginalized writers, so we encourage BIPOC, disabled, LGBTIAQ+, and neurodivergent writers to submit. We are also excited to see work by previously unpublished writers.

Fiction: Please submit one short story per entry, 2,000-6,000 words in length. Double-spaced, 12-point font (Times New Roman preferred). All subject matter is welcome, as long as it is not discriminatory in nature. We are equally excited to see speculative work and realism. Bring it on!

Poetry: Please submit up to three poems per entry. Each individual poem may be of any length. 12-point font.