Monday, March 22, 2021

Writing Competition: The New Michigan Press / DIAGRAM Chapbook Competition

The 2021 Chapbook Contest Guidelines

The New Michigan Press / DIAGRAM chapbook contest announces our guidelines for 2020! We select the majority of our chapbook list each year from the ranks of the chapbook contest finalists, so this is the best way to get your work read. And what's more, it's all read blind. Plus you get a free chapbook just for entering and you get to know that your entry helps us do what we do.

The Prize $1000 plus publication; finalist chapbooks also considered for publication (in 2020 we published five) 

The Entry Fee $20

Deadline April 30, 2021

What we want Interesting, lovely unpublished work (unpublished as a whole; individual pieces may be published already of course), prose or poetry or some combination or something between genres, 18-44 manuscript pages (no more than one poem per page if you're sending poems unless they are very, very short).

Images okay? Yes, as long as you can obtain reprint rights for any images you include, unless they're in the public domain or qualify under the exemption for fair use. We do prefer images be in low-res for the manuscript to keep file size down (the submissions manager maxes out at around 9 megabytes), but we'll need high-res versions if your manuscript is selected for publication. ALSO: please don't send originals of anything, since we cannot return manuscripts.

Other questions?

It's fine with us if individual works have been published elsewhere, but the manuscript can't have been published as a whole before. Please include specific acknowledgments if any of the works have appeared elsewhere: tell us where individual pieces appeared, as we do sometimes consider submitted and unpublished individual pieces for possible publication in DIAGRAM.

We recommend that your manuscript be as coherent--as much a project--as possible. Not to say everything needs to be thematic or narratively related, but most of our winning chapbooks have a feeling of aesthetic unity or connection or resonance: we think chapbooks should make sense as chapbooks, and be more than the sums of their parts. Chapbook manuscripts do not necessarily have to be diagrammatic (though the diagrammers among us do enjoy those).

Co-authored manuscripts are fine.

Submitting multiple manuscripts is fine with entry fees for each.

Simultaneous submissions are fine as long as you let us know ASAP if a manuscript needs to be withdrawn.

Please don't put your name/identifying info on the piece itself. If you send electronically, it'll be in the submitter info only, and that doesn't get forward to our readers. If you send via the mail, include a detachable cover page.

Email:

contestATthediagramDOTcom (Change At to @ and DOT to . )

with further questions if you have them.

Submit your work here.

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