We found almost four dozen excellent free poetry and prose contests with deadlines between May 15-June 30. In this issue, please enjoy an excerpt from "Les aventures de Marcel Proust: À la recherche du temps perdu", illustrated by Julian Peters.

Deadline Next Month
NORTH STREET BOOK PRIZE FOR SELF-PUBLISHED BOOKS
Deadline: June 30. 9th year. Prizes increased to $20,400, including a top award of $10,000. This year's categories: Mainstream/Literary Fiction, Genre Fiction, Creative Nonfiction & Memoir, Poetry, Children's Picture Book, Middle Grade (new), Graphic Novel & Memoir, and Art Book. Now accepting hybrid-published as well as self-published books. Fee: $75 per entry. Jendi Reiter and Ellen LaFleche will judge, assisted by Annie Mydla, Sarah Halper, and Lauren Singer. See the previous winners and enter here.

Also open now, our Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest will award $9,000 in prizes, including two top awards of $3,000 each. Submit 1-3 poems for $22. Deadline: September 30.

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Submissions are now open for Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, Grist's cli-fi contest. Imagine 2200 seeks stories of 3,000 to 5,000 words that envision the next 180 years of equitable climate progress—roughly seven generations—imagining intersectional worlds of abundance, adaptation, reform, and hope.

There is no cost to enter. Submissions close June 13, 2023, 11:59pm US Pacific Time. The winning writer will be awarded $3,000, with the second- and third-place winners receiving $2,000 and $1,000, respectively. An additional nine finalists will each receive $300. All winners and finalists will have their story published in an immersive collection on Grist's website. Stories will be judged by a panel of literary experts, including acclaimed authors Paolo Bacigalupi, Nalo Hopkinson, and Sam J. Miller. Learn more and submit your story here.

Congratulations to Fernando Andres Torres, John Sibley Williams, Diane Lederman, Gary Beck, Gloria Mindock, Lesléa Newman, Ruth Thompson, Cheryl J. Fish, Scott Best, Annie Dawid, Koss, Alan W. King, Judy Juanita, Duane L. Herrmann, Helen Bar-Lev, Joan Leotta, Eva Tortora, Shobana Gomes, The Poet Spiel, and Lisa Schantl.

Winning Writers editor Jendi Reiter's poems "Aprile Is the Cruelest Month" and "He Was Gay, Gary Cooper?" were published in Travesties?! A Queer Journal of Uncanny Arts. Their poems "Uncle Junior Shelters in Place", "You Know, Quasimodo Predicted All This", and "Silvio Dante Contemplates Puberty Blockers" are forthcoming in Snarl, Issue #5 (Spring 2023). These poems are excerpted from Jendi's chapbook manuscript The Waste-Management Land: Poems Inspired by "The Sopranos". Contact Jendi to make them an offer of publication they can't refuse.

Learn about our subscribers' achievements and see links to samples of their work.

Have news? Please email it to jendi@winningwriters.com.

Do you use TikTok or Instagram? Send your news to the @winningwriters account so we can share it!

Deadline: May 18

Cash awards of $500, $400, $300, $200, and $100, plus trophies for our top five winners. We will showcase up to 20 poems from each of these poets in our 2023 Poetry Masters Anthology.

For poets aged 14+. To enter, submit 1-3 of your best poems. Entry fee: $25. Finalists may be asked to submit a few more poems before our final decisions are made. Both published and unpublished poems are acceptable, any subject or style. Length limit per poem: 20 lines (excluding the title and any blank lines). International poets welcome. English only, please. Winners will be announced on Oprelle's website on or before June 30.

Submit online via Submittable.

Deadline: May 31

Authors & Artists Eligible

Rigel is the brightest star in the Orion constellation. Sunspot Lit is looking for the single short story, novel, novella, artwork, graphic novel, or poem that outshines all the rest. Literary or genre works accepted; the only requirement is quality.

Rigel offers $500 plus publication to the winner, and offers publication to select finalists. No restrictions on theme or category. The length for prose is restricted to a maximum of 5,000 words for short stories, or ten pages for poetry, scripts, and graphic novels.

Excerpts from longer works are eligible. These should start with the beginning of the manuscript and must include a synopsis. The synopsis counts toward the entry's total word/page count. An excerpt selected as the winner or as a finalist will be offered publication only for the submitted sample.

Titles do not count toward the limit for any prose piece. Epigraphs are included in the word count for works of prose. Artwork should consist of a single piece.

Feedback is available for fiction, nonfiction, and graphic novels for an additional fee. This is entirely optional and will not impact the judging process. The written comments will consider the work's strengths, point out critical weaknesses, and make recommendations for any changes that would make the work stronger. The commentary will be provided 4-6 weeks after the contest closes. Please note that feedback is only available through the Submittable form.

• Entry fee: $10
• Prize: $500 cash and publication for the winner; publication offered to runners-up and finalists.

Sunspot asks for first rights only; all rights revert to the contributor after publication. Works, along with the creators' bylines, are published in the next quarterly digital edition an average of two months after contest completion, as well as in the annual print edition.

Works should be unpublished except on a personal blog or website. Artists offered publication may display their pieces in galleries, festivals or shows throughout the publication contract period.

Enter as many times as you like, but only one piece per submission. Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please withdraw your piece if it is published elsewhere before the winner is selected.

Enter through Sunspot's Submittable form or through Duotrope.

Deadline: May 31

• Judge: Eduardo C. Corral, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition
• Prize: $500 and publication by Two Sylvias Press, 20 copies of the winning book, and an amethyst Depression-era glass trophy (circa 1930)

The Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize is open to all poets (previously published or not). Manuscripts should be 17-24 pages long. Simultaneous submissions are accepted. All manuscripts will be considered for publication.

Eduardo C. Corral is the author of Guillotine, longlisted for the National Book Award, and Slow Lightning, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. He's the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. He teaches in the MFA program at North Carolina State University.

Past Winners: Majda Gama, Saúl Hernández, Meg Griffitts, Cecilia Woloch, Jasmine An, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Hiwot Adilow, Stella Wong, and Christopher Salerno.

Created with the belief that great writing is good for the world, Two Sylvias Press is an award-winning publisher that has been featured in O, The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Forbes, NPR, and other noted outlets. Two Sylvias Press offers the popular National Poetry Month Writing Prompts and an Online Poetry Retreat created for writers who would like to generate new work with daily poetry prompts and creative inspiration. They also sell the nationally recognized Poet Tarot Guidebook: A Deck of Creative Exploration and the Weekly Muse, a project to help poets write and publish more poems.

Click here for full guidelines for the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize

Thank you for your support of our indie press during this time! Looking forward to reading your poems!

Deadline: June 15

Lynx House Press seeks submissions of full-length poetry manuscripts for the annual Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry. The winner receives $2,000 and publication. Each entrant receives a copy of a book from our back catalog.

The Prize is awarded for an unpublished, full-length volume of poems by a US author, which includes foreign nationals living and writing in the US and US citizens living abroad.

Previous winners include Carolyne Wright, Jim Daniels, Roy Bentley, Arianne Zwartjes, Lynne Burris Butler, Suzanne Lummis, Prartho Sereno, Marc Harshman, and Joe Wilkins. The 2022 winner was Sara Moore Wagner for her collection Lady Wing Shot. Lynx House Press has been publishing fine poetry and prose since 1975.

Poems included in submissions may not have appeared in full-length, single-author collections. Acknowledgments pages and author names may be included. Entries must be at least 48 pages in length. The reading fee for submitting is $28.

Submit via Submittable.

Deadline: June 15

A prize of $1,200 and publication in Mudfish is given annually for a single poem. Deborah Landau will judge. Submit up to three poems of any length with a $20 entry fee ($3 for each additional poem). All entries are considered for publication in the next issue of Mudfish.

See our entry submission page, or make your fee payable to Mudfish and mail with your entry to:
Mudfish Poetry Prize
Attn: Jill Hoffman, Editor
184 Franklin Street
New York, NY 10013

You may also send your fee via PayPal to mudfishmag@aol.com and submit your entry via email.

With your entry, please include a cover letter with the titles of the poems you've submitted, your name, and contact information (mailing address, phone number, and email address if available). Your name should not appear on the poems themselves. If submitting by postal mail, please also include a self-addressed stamped envelope to receive the results.

Also from Box Turtle Press, we are thrilled to announce the publication of Jill Hoffman's long-overdue EXCITING second novel, STONED! We welcome your orders.

In Jill Hoffman's irresistible Stoned, the poet Maud Diamond not only indulges in reefer madness in her Beresford bathroom, but takes a much younger live-in lover, a handsome Russian (would-be-famous) artist, to the horror of her precocious children. An explosive triangle, by turns hilarious and heartbreaking, brilliantly drawn with outsized characters worthy of Dickens, lavish imagery, and impeccable comedic timing. Hoffman has written a book so poignant and pleasurable, like a Crème Brûlée for the eyes, you'll read it again and again. And yet for all its seeming decadence there is a purity here like a fawn running into the water.

—Stephanie Emily Dickinson, author of Razor Wire Wilderness

Deadline: June 15

$500 and Publication will be awarded to the Grand Prize winner of The MacGuffin's POET HUNT 28. Barbara Crooker serves as the contest's guest judge. Up to two Honorable Mention poets will also be published along with the names of the finalists and semifinalists. All entrants will receive a copy of the issue that includes the judge's selections.

Send up to five poems per $15 entry fee. Include a cover page that lists your contact info and poem titles. This should be the only page containing personally identifiable information to preserve the anonymous review process. On the following page(s), include your poems, beginning each poem on a new page.

Enter via Submittable, by email, or mail your materials to:
The MacGuffin • Attn: Poet Hunt 28 • 18600 Haggerty Road • Livonia, MI 48152

For the complete rules, visit The MacGuffin's website.

Deadline: June 30

Winning Writers will award a grand prize of $10,000 in the ninth annual North Street competition for self-published and hybrid-published books. Choose from eight categories:

• Mainstream/Literary Fiction
• Genre Fiction
• Creative Nonfiction & Memoir
• Poetry
• Children's Picture Book
• Middle Grade (new!)
• Graphic Novel & Memoir
• Art Book

$20,400 will be awarded in all, and the top nine winners will receive additional benefits to help market their books. Books published on all self-publishing and hybrid-publishing platforms are eligible. Any year of publication is eligible. Entry fee: $75 per book, with free gifts for everyone who enters.

Please enjoy our judges' remarks on the winners of the eighth contest:

Grand Prize winner Diane Chiddister's exquisite literary novel One More Day delves into the inner lives of four denizens of an old-age home: a playful woman with dementia and a penchant for escape attempts, an anthropologist who must rely on strengths other than his mind as he approaches death, a nurse who's better at giving than receiving love, and a dedicated administrator whose authority is challenged. Full of tenderness that stays on the right side of sentimentality, One More Day stands out for how well it braids its four characters' paths into a journey that leaves all their lives richer. In revealing the complex and strangely logical thought processes of a barely verbal woman with Alzheimer's, the novel teaches us not to underestimate such people's intelligence and depth of feelings.

[click to read all the remarks]

Deadline: July 1

Bellevue Literary Review's annual prizes recognize exceptional writing about health, healing, illness, the body, and the mind.

• Goldenberg Prize for Fiction
Judged by Marie Myung-Ok Lee

• Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction
Judged by Edgar Gomez

• John and Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry
Judged by Melissa Lozada-Oliva

Each category offers a $1,000 First Prize and $300 Honorable Mention. Winners and honorable mentions will be published in the Spring 2024 issue of BLR.

Poetry: 3 poems per submission
Fiction and Nonfiction: 5,000 words maximum
Only previously unpublished work will be considered.
Entry fee $20.

Visit BLR's website for complete guidelines.

Deadline: July 15

Submissions are now open for the Francine Ringold Awards for New Writers, which honor the work of writers at the beginning of their careers. The Francine Ringold Awards are open only to writers whose work has not appeared or is not scheduled to appear in more than two publications in the genre in which they are submitting. $500 prizes will be awarded in both the fiction and poetry categories, and the winning work will appear in the spring issue of Nimrod. Work by all honorable mentions will also be published, and honorable mentions will be paid at a rate of $10/page up to $200.

Established in 1956, Nimrod is dedicated to the discovery of new voices in literature, and the Francine Ringold Awards are a special way to recognize talented new poets and fiction writers.

• Poetry: Up to 5 pages of poetry (one long poem or several short poems)
• Fiction: 5,000 words maximum (one short story or a self-contained excerpt from a novel)
• Entry fee: $12 per entry (plus $1.70 processing fee if submitted online); includes a copy of the spring issue
• No previously published works or works accepted for publication elsewhere.

Author's name must not appear on the manuscript. Include a cover sheet containing major title(s), author's name, full address, phone, and email. Entries may be mailed to Nimrod or submitted online. Open internationally.

For complete rules, visit Nimrod's website.

Deadline: July 15

The annual Rattle Poetry Prize celebrates its 18th year with a 1st prize of $15,000 for a single poem. Ten finalists will also receive $500 each and publication, and be eligible for the $5,000 Readers' Choice Award, to be selected by subscriber and entrant vote. All of these poems will be published in the winter issue of the magazine.

With the winners judged in a masked review by the editors to ensure a fair and consistent selection, an entry fee that is simply a one-year subscription to the magazine—and a runner-up Readers' Choice Award to be chosen by the writers themselves—the Rattle Poetry Prize aims to be one of the most writer-friendly and popular poetry contests around.

We accept entries online and by mail. See Rattle's website for the complete guidelines and to read all of the past winners.

Please enjoy "Conduction" by Francesca Bell, one of last year's finalists published in the Winter 2022 issue:

Conduction

The man drives as closely to my car
as he can without making contact.
His truck window is down.
He is taking my right of way,
and I’m driving home, already crying,
from the audiologist’s office.
I’ve turned on the music
and have just been thinking
that somewhere in Denmark,
an engineer lays her head
on a pillow filled, perhaps,
with eiderdown, her mind stuffed
with equations she mastered
in order to write the code
for the music setting on my
new hearing aids. They cost me
as much as a used car
and will not rejuvenate
my cilia, cannot rebuild
this foundation that gradually
crumbles, but they have
resurrected, for this moment,
the voice of the trumpet
and polished its bright tones.
I cannot conceive
of how the years she bent
to her math books resulted
in this flashing beauty,
but I lean on it
the way a person leans
on a crutch when her knee
has given out, the way
I lean on Telemann who wrote
this concerto almost 300 years ago,
each note big enough
to compensate—across time—for loss,
for the man passing slowly by,
menace blaring from his eyes,
as, triumphant, he raises
his middle finger like a baton.

Jendi Reiter's latest poetry collection, Made Man (Little Red Tree), was a finalist for the da Vinci Eye Award, the book design category of the 2023 Eric Hoffer Awards. Tom W. Taylor a/k/a The Poet Spiel provided the cover and interior art for this collection. Enjoy this sample poem:

In the Rooms Where Men

          for Daniel and Grace Lavery

in the rooms where men
declare their inside views

where finally you passed
miraculous with hair
and engine
thrumming deep as new-

born machinery
you were aiming to be homed
and sure
you expected some small fur
to be blooded
beneath your convoy's joyful drag

race —
but in those tobacco-sweet
studies the secrets
of campfire and blunt
departure would be yours

from friendship's cell
where the soft drip
of tea and agreement
named man the chains
clasping their wrists invisible
as a lover's pledge

no more their mother
virtue presuming
you like themselves
stroking and snipping
baby's urges into clean
docked tails

peeling old names from your breast
pocket you enter
the rooms where men
have always stood in wide shoes

where their ties have always
unrolled silken as the scroll
of everything
you now have room to say
and sure

you expected they would take
a slow time to open
your report on scars

left by doorways
to these rooms

but their welcome booms its guns
instantly confiding
to be
one of them

is to be pallbearer
for the last steadying corner
of a sealed box

is to be the mouth over teeth

in the rooms where men
plate the next course
from a never printed family
menu everyone knows
except the meat

and you

with small hands
barely healed from scrubbing
almost grasp

they are not waiting for you to gentle them
they did not admit you on those terms

Some contests are best suited to writers at the early stages of their careers. Others are better for writers with numerous prizes and publications to their credit. Here is this month's selection of Spotlight Contests for your consideration:

Emerging Writers
Ocean Awareness Student Contest. Bow Seat will award prizes up to $1,500 in each genre for poetry/spoken word, creative writing (fiction and essays compete together), performing arts (music/dance), film, visual art, and interactive/multimedia by students aged 11-18 about climate change and ocean conservation. 2023 theme is "Climate Heroes in Action". Junior division is for students ages 11-14; Senior division is for students ages 15-18. Works submitted must have been created during the current academic year (September 2022-June 2023). Enter by June 13.

Intermediate Writers
Black Orchid Novella Award. The best traditional mystery novella will win $1,000 and publication in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Entries should be 15,000-20,000 words. See website for thematic and stylistic restrictions. Essentially, they are looking for an old-fashioned story of deduction, with a witty style and an engaging relationship between the characters, and no explicit sex or violence. Contest co-sponsor The Wolfe Pack is the official fan club for Nero Wolfe, a legendary fictional sleuth created by Rex Stout in a series of mystery novels published from 1934 to 1975. Due May 31.

Advanced Writers
Griffin Poetry Prize. The Griffin Trust will award CDN$130,000 for English-language poetry books published in the current calendar year (author may be from any country) and CDN$10,000 for shortlisted entries and a debut Canadian author. Translations are eligible, with the prize split between author and translator. Publisher should send 4 copies of book plus entry form and a press packet. This is one of the most lucrative poetry prizes, as well as one of the most prestigious. The June 30 deadline is for books published between January 1-June 30, 2023. Books published between July 1-December 31 must be submitted by December 31, 2023.

See more Spotlight Contests for emerging, intermediate, and advanced writers within The Best Free Literary Contests database.

Winning Writers finds open submission calls and free contests in a variety of sources, including Erika Dreifus' Practicing Writer newsletter, FundsforWriters, Erica Verrillo's blog, Authors Publish, Lit Mag News Roundup, Poets & Writers, The Writer, Duotrope, Submittable, and literary journals' own newsletters and announcements.

• Prairie Fire: "Haunted" Issue
(creative writing on what keeps you up at night - May 26)

• Contemporary Verse 2
(poetry and criticism in English or French - May 31)

• Shenandoah: Flash Nonfiction
(essays under 1,000 words by writers who are BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, disabled, and/or from other marginalized identities - May 31)

• Tint Journal
(creative writing in English by non-native speakers - May 31)

• Massachusetts Review: Revisiting WOMAN: AN ISSUE
(poems, stories, essays on 21st-century conceptions of womanhood - June 1)

• Journal of Compressed Creative Arts
(prose poems, flash fiction and essays - June 15)

• Grimoire: "Medusa" Issue
(poetry, fiction, essays, spells on theme of femme anti-heroes - August 1)

• JackLeg Press
(literary novels, stories, essay collections, memoirs - December 31)

This month, editor Jendi Reiter presents selected books that deserve your attention. There are many more in our Books resource section.

Stephanie Cowell
THE BOY IN THE RAIN
In this bittersweet historical novel set in Edwardian England, a young painter and an aspiring socialist politician fall in love, but their idyll is overshadowed by the criminalization of homosexuality. This book stands out for its meditative, introspective prose and its insight into how the bonds of love are tested, broken, and re-created as two people mature.

John W. Evans
THE FIGHT JOURNAL
The Bible may say that love keeps no record of wrongs, but when love sours, every memory becomes an entry in a ledger of unpayable claims. This painfully honest chapbook depicts competing narratives and raw emotions in the wake of an unwanted divorce. When all the blame has been divided up, and everyone has switched sides as many times as possible, love's persistence and its failures are still both mysteries to be accepted rather than understood. Winner of the 2022 Rattle Chapbook Contest.

Cheryl J. Fish
OFF THE YOGA MAT
Three New York intellectuals on the cusp of their 40th birthdays fumble toward maturity as Y2K looms. Every environment in this gentle yet deep novel is fully realized—from the anarchy of the "freegans" in Tompkins Square Park, to the domestic rituals of Finnish sauna culture, and the Black community of pre-Katrina New Orleans. The protagonists' lives and loves intersect repeatedly, like complex and shifting yoga poses, hopefully leading to a bit more enlightenment by the time we reluctantly bid them goodbye.

Abby E. Murray
HAIL AND FAREWELL
This incisive debut poetry collection from Perugia Press is narrated by a military wife who chafes against the isolation and patriarchal gender expectations of her role on the homefront. Combining plain-spoken heartache and biting humor, these poems explore the erasure of women's labor.

Pádraig Ó Tuama
FEED THE BEAST
Rage, survival, and the tentative beginning of self-love infuse this poetry chapbook about theological and sexual abuse in the Irish Catholic Church. The author was forced into "conversion therapy" for his homosexuality by a priest who molested him. Broken Sleep Books, the publisher of this collection, is a Welsh literary press with an interest in social justice and working-class themes.

Chuck Tingle
CAMP DAMASCUS
An autistic lesbian teen discovers the horrific secrets of the ex-gay camp that dominates her small Montana community. Forget about demons—the scariest part of this tale is the smiley-face gaslighting that our heroine endures from her parents and the celebrity pastor of the town's prosperity-gospel church. An excellent fast-paced novel with humor and poetic justice served hot.

Please enjoy this excerpt from À la recherche du temps perdu, above pictured as Les aventures de Marcel Proust by Julian Peters and translated below by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin.

"And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; […] But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

"And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me […] immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set […] and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine […] the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea."

Ricardians Redux
Perhaps there was some trans component to my identification with male characters who were maligned for a disability. Richard III's supposed hunchback, actually scoliosis, factors heavily in Shakespeare's portrayal of him as a monstrous villain. From the Elephant Man to the Phantom of the Opera, I resonated with the storyline of having a physical secret that might make you unlovable. The irony of having to conceal yourself in order to be seen as the person you really were.

[Read more]

Jendi Reiter is the editor of Winning Writers.
Follow Jendi on Twitter at @JendiReiter.