Writing Competition: Fairy Tale Review Awards in Poetry and Prose

Fairy Tale Review Awards in Poetry and Prose

2014 Prose & Poetry Contest Guidelines

Fairy Tale Review is thrilled to announce the debut of an annual contest, beginning this year with Prose & Poetry awards. We’re interested in poems, stories, and essays with a fairy-tale feel—mainstream to experimental, genre to literary, realist to fabulist. Sarah Shun-lien Bynum will judge prose; Ilya Kaminsky will judge poetry. Both contests will award $1000, and all submissions will be considered for publication in The Mauve Issue. Reading fee: $10.

Submit online or to:

Fairy Tale Review, c/o Kate Bernheimer
Department of English
University of Arizona
Tucson AZ 85721

Deadline: July 15th, 2014

Awards: $1,000 each

Eligibility & Procedure

All submissions must be original and previously unpublished. For prose, please send works of up to 6,000 words. For poetry, no more than five poems and/or ten pages per entry. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable, but please withdraw your manuscript immediately upon acceptance elsewhere, and note that the reading fee is nonrefundable. Multiple submissions are acceptable, but please note that you will need to pay a reading fee for each submission.

Online submissions link.

Reading Fee: $10.00
Ten percent of your reading fee will be donated to Tucson Youth Poetry Slam as part of Fairy Tale Review’s interdisciplinary outreach efforts. (Fairy Tale Review has no official affiliation with Tucson Youth Poetry Slam.)

CLMP Contest Code of Ethics

CLMP’s community of independent literary publishers believe that ethical contests serve our shared goal: to connect writers and readers by publishing exceptional writing. We believe that intent to act ethically, clarity of guidelines, and transparency of process form the foundation of an ethical contest. To that end, we agree to 1) conduct our contests as ethically as possible and to address any unethical behavior on the part of our readers, judges, or editors; 2) to provide clear and specific contest guidelines—defining conflict of interest for all parties involved; and 3) to make the mechanics of our selection process available to the public. This Code recognizes that different contest models produce different results, but that each model can be run ethically. We have adopted this Code to reinforce our integrity and dedication as a publishing community and to ensure that our contests contribute to a vibrant literary heritage.

Fairy Tale Review Annual Contest Selection Process

1st Round of Judging: Non-Blind Read by Genre Editor and Editor. Finalists (approximately 15 poems, 15 pieces of prose) will then be forwarded to the contest judges for the 2nd Round of Judging.
2nd Round of Judging: Blind Read by Contest Judges. Judges change on a yearly basis.
Conflicts of Interest: Students, faculty, staff, or administrators currently affiliated with University of Arizona are ineligible for consideration or publication. Anyone with a substantial personal or professional affiliation with a judge is ineligible to enter in that category; if you have questions as to your eligibility, please contact ftreditorial (at) gmail (dot) com, and we will assess the situation together. Upon learning the Judges’ selections, the Editor will assess any potential conflict of interest before finalizing the result. We ask that past winners of our contest refrain from entering until three years after their winning entry was published.

Fairy Tale Review was established in 2005 and is an annual publication of Wayne State University Press.

About the Judges

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is the author of two novels, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award and winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including the New Yorker, Tin House, the Georgia Review, and the Best American Short Stories 2004 and 2009. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Fellowship, she was named one of “20 Under 40” fiction writers by the New Yorker. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Otis College of Art and Design.