Writing Competition: Goldline Press Chapbook Competition

 

We invite submissions of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry that are chapbook-length as a key element of their concept. Our judges this year are Jenny Tinghui Zhang in fiction, Samantha Hunt in nonfiction, and Claire Hong in Poetry.

Length: 20-30 pages of poetry, 7500-15000 words of prose.

Deadline: September 30, 2025. 

Entry Fee: $15.00 

Gold Line Press is affiliated with the PhD in Creative Writing & Literature Program at the University of Southern California.

• Multiple submissions are acceptable as long as they are submitted separately with separate entry fees.

• Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please be sure to withdraw your submission via Submittable if your work is accepted elsewhere.

• Please update any changes in contact information via your profile on Submittable.

• No revisions to submitted manuscripts will be considered. The author of the winning manuscript will work with Gold Line’s editorial staff to make revisions prior to publication.

• Colleagues and current or former students of this year’s judges — as well as current students of English or Creative Writing at the University of Southern California and recent alumni (graduating years 2018 to present) — are not eligible to submit.

• In December 2024 we will announce contest results by email, as well as on the Gold Line Press site. The winning chapbooks will be published in the fall of the following year.

• Each winner receives $750, publication of their perfect-bound chapbook with ISBN, and 50 contributor copies. Gold Line Press sends out 30 copies on behalf of winners for review. Winners can purchase additional copies of their chapbooks at cost.

• The chapbook is cataloged in the Library of Congress.

We welcome a wide range of styles and approaches. In past years, Gold Line Press has published both writing that is innovative or genre-crossing, and writing with that is more traditionally structured. While we have a particular interest in promoting the work of emerging writers, we welcome and celebrate submissions from writers in any stage of their career who are creating innovative and resonant chapbook-length texts.

We seek works of prose that are purposefully planned as chapbooks: novellettes, carefully curated collections of vignettes, short stories, essays, or other projects that take the chapbook format as an instrumental element of their design. Excerpts of novels or short story/essay collections should form a sustained and individual project in their foreshortened form. For poets, we also recommend that manuscripts be cohesive and self-contained in the chapbook length.

• Manuscripts must be 20-30 pages in length for poetry entries, and 7,500-15,000 words for fiction and nonfiction entries (not including the title page and table of contents). Please submit your manuscript typed in font such as Times New Roman or Arial. Prose manuscripts should be double-spaced.

• Manuscripts should be paginated with a table of contents at the beginning, unless the form of the book does not warrant it.

• Individual poems/short stories/essays may have been previously published, but the work as a whole must be original and unpublished.

• The manuscript must be in English. Translations are ineligible.

• The submission fee is waived for writers of color, indigenous writers, and writers facing financial hardship.

• All manuscripts must be received by SEPTEMBER 30, 2025 via Submittable.

• We do not accept hard copy submissions. Any manuscripts and checks we receive in the mail will be shredded and recycled without being read.