Writing Competition: Robert H. Winner Memorial Award

Robert H. Winner Memorial Award: $2,500

For a manuscript of 10 pages by a mid-career poet who has not had substantial recognition. Open to poets 40 and over who have published no more than one full-length collection of poetry. Poets who have not published a poetry collection are eligible.

Previously published poems are acceptable; include acknowledgment of publications on your cover sheet. Poems entered as part of a Winner manuscript may be entered individually in other PSA awards, if they haven’t been previously published.

Judged by Michael Dickman

Established by the family and friends of Robert H. Winner, whose first book of poems appeared when he was almost fifty years old.

Submission Details & Instructions 

• Awards are free for Poetry Society of America members.

• The fees for non-members are: single poem awards are $10, and multiple poem awards are $15.

• Personal identification cannot appear anywhere in the submission document, including in the file name.

• Only one entry per award.

• You cannot submit the same poem to more than one award.

• The exception: Individual poems submitted to the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award or Robert H. Winner Award may be submitted to another PSA award.

• The submission must not have been previously published or accepted for publication.

• The exception: Individual poems submitted to the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award and the Robert Winner Award may have been published.

• Simultaneous submissions are fine; if the poem is accepted elsewhere for publication, please withdraw the submission.

• Submissions written by more than one author are not eligible.

• Translations are not eligible. All poems must be original and primarily in English.

• A poem that has previously won a Poetry Society of America award cannot be resubmitted to any of the awards.

• We cannot accept corrections after submission.

• Submissions from Poetry Society employees, officers, advisory board committee members, or their immediate families are ineligible.

• All submissions are judged anonymously.

Notification 

• We cannot confirm receipt over the phone or email.

• We cannot accept any corrections or revisions to submissions.

• The winners will be announced in late spring.

More information and submission portal here. 

Writing Competition: 7th Annual Story Foudation Prize

We are proud to announce our seventh annual Story Foundation Prize is now open! The winner will receive $1500 and publication in our summer 2026 issue for a single short story.

This year’s judge is Deesha Philyaw, whose most recent book is the award-winning story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies. Submissions for the Story Foundation Prize opened on August 15, 2025 and will close at midnight PST on December 15, 2025.

Submit one short story of up to 10,000 words via our Submission Manager.

Our entry fee is $25. Each entrant receives a one-year subscription (three issues) to Story.

Please double-space your manuscript.

Multiple submissions and simultaneous submissions are welcome, but you must pay a separate fee for each entry and withdraw the piece immediately if accepted elsewhere.

Entries must be previously unpublished. All entries will be considered for publication at our regular rate. Previous winners of the Story Foundation Prize are not eligible.

Winners will be announced in March 2026.

Questions? Please contact us via email at:

contact@storymagazine.org

We look forward to reading your work!

Call for Submissions: Shift: A Journal of Literary Oddities

The reading period for Issue #8 (2026) runs from October 15, 2025, to January 15, 2026.

We will respond to contributors by May 31, 2026.

Please send us your best work! We accept simultaneous submissions—but NOT previously published work. During our reading period, please notify us by email if you wish to withdraw a piece for any reason, including acceptance by another journal.

We value human creativity and effort. We do not accept work generated by AI or assisted by AI beyond basic spellcheck and grammar check.

Please read these directions carefully. You may submit a total of five (5) pieces to Shift across all categories.

Each one requires a separate submission.

We do NOT consider groups of poems.

Please fill out a form for each submission.

We read blindly during our initial review. Please remove your name and contact info EVERYWHERE in your Word document. This means no name in the document header or in the document title. We will be able to track your submission through the Google form. Include only the word count, page numbers, and title.

Name the file with the initials of your first and last name and keywords from the title (all in one word). For example: SWLiteraryTale

Submission Forms (will reopen on October 15, 2025)

Fiction form (under 4,000 words)
Nonfiction form (under 4,000 words)
Poetry form (under 75 lines)
Art/Photo/Image form (in a JPEG with a resolution of at least 300 dpi)

Answers to additional FAQs

• We do not charge a reading fee.

• Each contributor to the journal will receive one complimentary print copy of the issue.

• Published work may be nominated for Best of the Net, Pushcart, and other awards.

• Authors whose work particularly dazzles us might be invited to participate in Ringling’s Visiting Writers Forum, a conversation series with authors and other literary professionals:

www.visitingwritersforum.com

• Please direct any journal-related questions to our email.

• Again, we do NOT accept AI-generated or AI-assisted work.

Visit their website here. 

Pushcart Prize Nomination

 Many thanks to Mathieu Callier for nominating my micro-fiction, "Red," for a Pushcart Prize! You can read it here.

 

Fellowship: Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing

The MVICW Emerging Writer Fellowships are open to all writers who have yet to publish a full-length book or chapbook. These fellowships continue MVICW's mission of supporting new writers from all backgrounds, genres, and ages (16+) in their creative endeavors at our Summer Writers' Conference.

Deadline: Jan. 19, 2026 

FELLOWSHIP PRIZES:

One Full Fellowship Winner will receive the Full Attendance Package to the MVICW Summer Writers' Conference which includes registration, lodging, and a manuscript session.

One Second-Place Fellowship Winner will receive 50% toward registration for the MVICW Summer Writers’ Conference

Please note: We only announce the names of our first place winners on social media and in our public announcements. Finalists will not be announced.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

DO NOT INCLUDE YOUR NAME IN THE TITLE, FILE NAME, SUBMISSION, OR LETTER OF INTEREST. Submissions will be judged anonymously.

For Poetry Submissions Letter of Interest (approx. 750 words): Please tell us about who you are as a person and an artist. We'd like to hear about your life, your artistic career, and your creative work. If you have specific needs (financial or creative) which would be met by this award please outline them in your letter.
Submit your single best poem (1-3 pages max)

For Prose Submissions Letter of Interest (approx. 750 words): Please tell us about who you are as a person and an artist. We'd like to hear about your life, your artistic career, and your creative work. If you have specific needs (financial or creative) which would be met by this award please outline them in your letter.
Submit one short story OR one flash fiction piece OR novel excerpt OR creative nonfiction entry. (The submission should not exceed 3,000 words).

Please Note: If your submission exceeds our guidelines, we will submit either the first 3,000 words of your prose submission or the first poem of your poetry submission.

ADDITIONAL GUIDELINES: 

• Payment is $20 per submission. You are welcome to submit more than one piece by submitting them separately and paying the submission fee for each entry.

• The entry must be submitted in English and must be your own original work.

• You may submit new or previously published material. As the manuscripts will not be published/reprinted, the author retains all rights to the work.

• There is no restriction to style, content, or genre.

• You must not have published a full-length book or chapbook

• You must be 16 years old or older on the day the retreat begins to enter.

• The submission must not include your real or pen name or any information that identifies you in any way.

• You must submit before midnight on the deadline date.

• Previous First Prize Fellowship & Contest Winners (who attended the in-person conference) are not eligible to apply. However, second-place winners and all virtual conference winners are eligible.

DETAILS ON AWARDS AND RULES:

One fellowship recipient will receive registration, lodging, and a manuscript session at the MVICW Summer Writers’ Conference. The lodging for full fellowship recipients is a triple room with two other attendees at MVICW lodging. If a private room is preferred, the winning writer may choose to pay the difference. The prize does not include lodging outside of MVICW shared-lodging, but the winner may choose to forfeit the lodging stipend and arrange for their own accommodations on the island. The awards do not cover air/travel to the island or food/personal expenses. One runner-up recipient will receive 50% toward registration for the MVICW Summer Writers’ Conference.

You are not eligible to enter the competition if you are (a) our employee or independent contractor of MVICW; (b) a family member (spouses, domestic partners, parents, grandparents, siblings, children, and grandchildren) of our employees; (c) a judge involved in the competition, including any reviewer who participates in selecting the nominees and finalists; (d) a close friend of the judge so that the judge can identify your work; (e) a previous MVICW full fellowship/first place contest winner. However, first place winners of our Virtual Conference Fellowships are eligible to apply in hopes of winning attendance to our in-person conference.

We will notify potential winners via email or telephone. If potential winners decline the prize or fail to respond within seven (7) days after the first contact, the winners will be deemed to forfeit the prize and MVICW has the right to select alternate potential winner(s) in their place.

Send your entry here. 

Call for Submissions: The Shared Drafts Project

The Shared Drafts Project celebrates the vulnerable, the flawed, and the too-much. We don’t want polish — we want pulse.

This issue invites the kind of writing meant for you, not others — the notes, reminders, and quiet reflections that catch who you are in the moment. The pages that help you think, process, or simply make sense of a day or yourself or something else.

We are not accepting poetry, prose, fiction, or short stories. We’re only reading journal-style entries — reflections, notes, and fragments written for yourself, not for an audience.

They can come from but are not limited to:

Notebooks
Notes apps
Audio Recordings
To-do lists
Creative logs
Sketchbooks
Planners

Rules
Just send one thing.

Must follow a journal format in the form of self reflection or something written for yourself.
For writing, maximum 5 pages in length.

Submission Window: November 15, 2025 - January 15, 2026
If your piece is selected, you will hear from us by February 20th, 2026.

Honorarium: $5.00 for selected works. 

Submit your work here.

Call for Submissions on Theme of "Sabotage": Muleskinner Journal

 

 

Submissions for Journal Sixteen open!

Our theme: Sabotage

So fun to say.
It thumps like a shoe dropped into the gears. It smolders like a slow fuse lit under the floorboards.

For Journal Sixteen, we are looking for sabotage.Sweet or bitter. Large or small. It might be a quiet refusal, a deliberate misstep, or a coded message. It might be a love letter thrown away by a jealous friend. It might be the body rebelling against itself, a system collapsing from within, a character who undermines their own desires. It might be the artist’s hand trembling on purpose, the poem that undoes its own logic, the narrative that eats its tail.

As always, we invite you to interpret this theme liberally—bend it, twist it, betray it. Sabotage it, if you must.

Send us your beautiful wreckage, your quiet detonations, your elaborate ruses, and your betrayals of self. We’ll be listening for the sound of gears grinding, the machinery silenced.

Muleskinner Journal Sixteen will close on December 15.

Our submission guidelines are here. Do your worst. It’s Sabotage!

What we look for…

Muleskinner Journal accepts previously unpublished work only. Please use the following guidelines for your submission. Submit in only one category. Send no more than one submission per issue.

Poetry: Any length or form. (1-3 pieces)

Flash or Micro Fiction: max. 1000 words each (1-3 pieces)

Short Story/excerpts from longer (previously unpublished) work: (max. 6000 words) Please include word count on first page

Creative Nonfiction: (max. 3000 words) Please include word count on first page

Manuscript Guidelines…

We accept unsolicited general submissions for free, through Submittable.
We have a Tip Jar. It’s voluntary. But’s it’s there to help us offset costs and build toward paying our writers. Someday. Soon.

Submissions should be in .doc or .docx format and the file should be titled: Last Name_Title or Last Name_Poems.

Prose submissions should be sent in Times New Roman or similar, 12pt font, double-spaced, always, with numbered pages.

For prose, include the word count at the top of the first page.

Simultaneous submissions are fine — we’re writers too, after all — but let us know if your piece is accepted elsewhere.

Include a short, third-person bio - we want to know who you are, and include any social media handles you would like us to share.

No more than one submission per issue.

Feel free to inquire about the status of your submission if you haven’t heard back after a month. We try to be quick.

No re-submissions of the same work unless a revision was specifically requested.

And finally, when you send us a submission, we will add you to our mailing list. This will never be shared with anyone. You can unsubscribe at any time. We ask that you stay on our mailing list as a way of staying with the community we are building. We won’t send you too much, and we won’t send you advertising. If you do unsubscribe, you may always resubscribe yourself, but we will not auto-subscribe you again, no matter how many times you send us your work to consider. In short, we respect your Inbox.

We look for writing of all kinds that uses skill, wit, and determination to deliver the goods. We accept and publish poetry, short fiction, flash fiction, micro-fiction, short scripts, excerpts from longer works, memoir, criticism, craft essays, artwork, journalism, and shopping lists.

We don’t care who you are, as long as you are the author of what you submit.

And, we hate to have to say this, but please respect yourself, your readers, and other writers, and do not do that silly and shameful AI thing.

Submit your work here.