We found over four dozen excellent free poetry and prose contests with deadlines between December 15-January 31. In this issue, please enjoy a holiday card by Julian Peters and one more chance to order Poems to See By at a 30% discount.

Technical alert! We made several changes to our website infrastructure this month to improve security. A few subscribers may have difficulty logging into The Best Free Literary Contests. You may see messages like "This form has expired" or "Too many redirects". We are working on automated solutions but in the meantime, if this happens to you, please clear your browser cache, delete your winningwriters.com cookies, and restart your web browser. The whole process should take five minutes or less. Here is how to do it in Chrome (clear cache, delete a specific cookie), Firefox (clear cache, delete a specific cookie), and Safari (clear cache and cookies). Still having trouble? Please email us at info@winningwriters.com.

This month, Annie Mydla's column examines the perils of first-person narration, the "hard mode" of fiction writing. Without great care, it can collapse tension, reduce reader investment, and diminish the authority of the storytelling.

We also have tips to share from your fellow subscribers. Ryan Poirier highlights a great printer for books with demanding graphics. William Luvaas recommends a publisher that has special advantages as a "teaching press". If you have a tip, recommendation, or warning, please email it to info@winningwriters.com.

Open at Winning Writers, co-sponsored by Duotrope
WERGLE FLOMP HUMOR POETRY CONTEST - NO FEE
Free to enter, $3,750 in prizes, including a top award of $2,000.

TOM HOWARD/JOHN H. REID FICTION & ESSAY CONTEST
$12,000 in prizes, including two top awards of $3,500 each. $25 entry fee.

Like what we do?
Please nominate us for the next Writer's Digest list of the "101 Best Websites for Writers". We were proud to be named to this list in 2022, 2023, and 2024. Complete the short online nomination form by December 16.

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Registration now open for our multi-genre workshop for writers working in the disciplines of memoir/personal essay and fiction.

May 4-10, 2025

Taught by bestselling, award-winning author, Leslie Schwartz. Daily classes include comprehensive craft discussions, workshop, and private conferences with the instructor.

Sponsored by List og Land Artists and Writers Residency, Westfjords, Iceland, offering beautiful, comfortable accommodations on a remote fjord at the intersection of inspiration and creativity.

We offer a geothermal hot spring, pool and sauna on List og Land's 4,200 acres of wild Iceland, plus whales, foxes, curious seals and endless hiking.

Includes a sightseeing tour to Reykjarfjörður hot pool and the A House in Fossfjorður plus more.

For information and details on cost, classroom instruction, accommodations and registration, please visit List og Land.

Email inquiries: writingworkshoplol@gmail.com or schwartz0505@gmail.com.

 

Congratulations to William Luvaas, Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Jed Myers, Geoffrey Heptonstall, Stacy Alderman, R.T. Castleberry, Alexandra Burack, Geoffrey K. Graves, R. Bremner, Shobana Gomes, and Don Mitchell.

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 extended to December 18

First Prize: $1,250, publication in LitMag, and agency review by Mollie Glick of CAA, Nat Sobel of Sobel Weber Associates, Erin Harris and Sonali Chanchani of Folio Literary Management, Jenny Bent of The Bent Agency, David Forrer of Inkwell Management, Monika Woods of Triangle House, Emily Forland of Brandt & Hochman, and Sarah Fuentes of UTA.

Finalists: Three finalists will receive $100 each. All finalists will be considered for possible agency review and publication.

Entries must be unpublished short stories between 500 and 1,500 words. Enter through Submittable only. Entry fee: $16.

Click for the complete guidelines and enter your flash fiction.

Deadline: December 31

Gifted fiction writers! Lilith magazine—independent, Jewish & frankly feminist—seeks quality short stories with heart, soul, and chutzpah, 3,000 words or under, for our Annual Fiction Contest.

First prize: $300 and publication. No fee to enter. We especially like fresh fiction with feminist and Jewish nuance and are eager to read submissions from writers of color and emerging writers of any age.

Submit to info@lilith.org with the subject line “Fiction Contest” and your surname. Include full contact information on manuscript.

Check out FRANKLY FEMINIST: Short Stories by Jewish Women from Lilith Magazine, available here or wherever you buy books.

Deadline: December 31

Attention Women Poets:

Two Sylvias Press is looking to publish Full-Length Poetry Manuscripts by Women Over 50
(Open to both established and emerging poets)

Prize: $1,000 and print book publication by Two Sylvias Press, and 20 copies of the winning book

The Wilder Series Poetry Book Prize is open to women over 50 years of age (born on or before December 31, 1974). Women submitting manuscripts may be poets with one or more previously published chapbooks/books or poets without any prior chapbook/book publications. (We use an inclusive definition of "woman" and "female" and of course welcome trans women, genderqueer women, and non-binary people who are female-identified or AFAB.) All manuscripts will be considered for publication. See the complete contest guidelines.

Learn more about the prize and Two Sylvias Press. Previous winners & manuscripts chosen for the Wilder Poetry Book Prize include Tiffany Midge, Gail Griffin, Michelle Bitting, Gail Martin, Kelly Cressio-Moeller, Erica Bodwell, Adrian Blevins, Dana Roeser, Molly Tenenbaum, and Carmen Gillespie.

Simultaneous submissions allowed.

NOTE: Our mission at Two Sylvias Press is to support poets. Your manuscript will NOT be disqualified if it was submitted incorrectly. We will not penalize you for trying and making a mistake. If we have a question or concern about your manuscript format, we will contact you and allow you to resubmit. Please know that we are on your side. Thank you for trusting us with your work.

First Prize: $2,500, publication in LitMag, and agency review by Mollie Glick of CAA, Nat Sobel of Sobel Weber Associates, Lisa Bankoff of Bankoff Collaborative, Erin Harris and Sonali Chanchani of Folio Literary Management, Jenny Bent of The Bent Agency, David Forrer of Inkwell Management, Monika Woods of Triangle House, Emily Forland of Brandt & Hochman, and Sarah Fuentes of UTA.

Finalists: Three finalists will receive $100 each. All finalists will be considered for possible agency review and publication.

Deadline: December 31

Contest Fee: $20. Entries must be unpublished short stories between 3,000 and 8,000 words. Submit through Submittable only. See the results of previous contests.

Deadline: January 6, 2025

Submissions are closing soon for the DISQUIET Literary Prize! This contest is for writing in fiction, nonfiction, or poetry by a writer who has not yet published a full-length book. The first prize winners in each genre will be published:

• the fiction winner in Granta.com
• the nonfiction winner in Ninthletter.com
• the poetry winner in The Common

One grand prize winner will receive a full scholarship including tuition, lodging, and a $1,000 travel stipend to attend the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon in 2025 (June 22-July 4). Genre winners will receive full tuition waivers. Cash prize available in lieu of travel. Reading fee: $15.

Read the full contest guidelines or enter at Submittable.

Authors want readers to feel close to their stories, characters, and narrative voices. It can be tempting to reach for first-person narration, but many times that's not artful enough. Good fiction succeeds not because it draws from the "common sense" we know from everyday life, but because its author has become an expert at creating an artificially immersive experience for the reader. That takes a whole different set of rules and tools.

From this point of view, first-person narration is like the "hard mode" of fiction writing due to the temptation of using "common sense". It can collapse tension, reduce reader investment, and diminish the authority of the storytelling. Read on to ensure your first-person narrator isn't falling into these ten traps.

[read more]

Ploughshares welcomes unsolicited submissions of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction during our regular reading period, open now through January 15. To submit to the journal, including the Fall Longform Issue, please review our guidelines.

Submissions are free if you submit by mail and $3.75 if you submit online (preferred). Subscribe to Ploughshares and submit online for free.

Ploughshares has published quality literature since 1971. Our award-winning literary journal is published four times a year: blended poetry and prose issues in the Winter and Spring, a prose issue in the Summer, and a special longform prose issue in the Fall.

Deadline: January 15, 2025

The annual Rattle Chapbook Prize gives poets something truly special. Every year, three winners will each receive: $5,000 cash, 500 contributor copies, and distribution to Rattle's ~8,000 subscribers. In a world where a successful full-length poetry book might sell 1,000 copies, the winning book will reach an audience eight times as large on its release day alone—an audience that includes many other literary magazines, presses, and well-known poets. This will be a chapbook to launch a career.

And maybe the best part is this: The $30 entry fee is just a standard subscription to Rattle, which includes four issues of the magazine and three winning chapbooks, even if one of them isn't yours. Rattle is one of the most-read literary journals in the world—find out why just by entering! For more information, visit our website.

We congratulate our three winners from our 2024 contest:

• Eric Kocher, Sky Mall (Fall 2024)
• Denise Duhamel, In Which (Winter 2024)
• Kat Lehmann, no matter how it ends a bluebird's song (Spring 2025)

Please enjoy this poem by 2024 winner Denise Duhamel. It appears in In Which, published by Rattle this December.

Self-Portrait in Which I Am Not Polite

I'm not wearing lipstick. Hell, I haven't even
brushed my teeth. My nails are unpolished, ragged,
dangerous if you try to take my hand. I don't know
how else to say it … I just don't care. There's sleep
in my eyes, the gooey kind, dandruff on my scalp.
I have given up on deodorant and soap.
Say hello at your own peril. Sneer and I will whack
you, possibly throw an old stiletto—so duck!
I cut the line, honk my horn, chew with a full mouth,
then burp. The piercings in my ear lobes have closed,
my heart has closed. And my clothes? I've stopped
doing laundry. I've stopped the tedium of handwashing
my delicates. I've given up on bras. They hurt.
I've given up on doing dishes, smiling, shaving
(or crossing) my legs. I've given up on purses,
bangles on my wrist, any expectations of femininity.
No, you cannot sit here. No, I don't have a minute.
I've given up on the color pink and mirrors.
I leave splats on the floor and dust on the shelf.
I've never felt more like myself.

Deadline: February 28, 2025 (do not enter before January 1)

I-70 Review offers the Bill Hickok Humor Award for a single unpublished poem. Allison Joseph will judge. Winner will receive $1,000. Winning poem will appear in the 2025 issue of I-70 Review. Submit 1-3 unpublished poems with a $15 entry fee.

All submissions will be eligible for publication in I-70 Review. See the complete guidelines and enter.

The Humor Award was created and funded by the N.W. Dible Foundation in honor of Bill Hickok, past president of the Foundation. Our interests are in writing grounded in fresh language, imagery, and metaphor. Although we tend to prefer free verse, we want the writer to pay attention to the sound and rhythm of the language. We like poetry with individual voice. We like a good lyric or a strong narrative. We like topics that are different and interesting or common topics with a different perspective or approach.

Ryan Poirier
I recommend Studiocomix Press for graphics-heavy book printing and more. They produce incredible work and ship anywhere. After winning the 2021 North Street Book Prize for Graphic Novel & Memoir with my comics collection, The Herd, I worked with Studiocomix to expand merchandise with a coloring book, t-shirts, poster prints, playing cards, and a tarot deck. Studiocomix was able to print everything, and the order was ready within a week!

Find Ryan's books and artwork at Accidental Creations.

William Luvaas
The University of Wisconsin's Cornerstone Press formats, prints, promotes, and distributes their writers' books, designs professional-level covers, sends out Advance Review Copies (ARCs) to major review venues and some book contests, and arranges readings, both in-person and on Zoom. Cornerstone is one of the five teaching presses in the country, part of an academic program that prepares students to go into publishing, and for this reason they have human resources that many small presses lack. I have enjoyed working with them.

Pre-order The Three Devils, William's new story collection from Cornerstone.

Have a tip, recommendation, or warning? Please email it to us at info@winningwriters.com.

Jendi Reiter's second novel, Origin Story (Saddle Road Press), is a love story about a gay comic-book author who transforms traumatic memories through his art. Novelist Donald Mengay, author of The Lede to Our Undoing and Ojo, says in his 5-star Goodreads review:

"Origin Story is a fantastic, creative, witty, savvy, troubling journey through queer culture in NYC in the 1990s. Brimming with period detail it brings that decade to life in such a way that it becomes a character in the novel. Experimental in form and theme, it challenges the reader to rethink so many knowns about identity, family, religion, and love. It is a boundary-breaking work in so many ways, particularly in its treatment of gender and sexuality."

Buy Origin Story now on Bookshop.org.

From Two Sylvias Press

Subscriptions to the Weekly Muse now include 2 NEW CLASSES featuring the legendary Carolyn Forché and the amazing Dorianne Laux!

By becoming a paid subscriber to the Weekly Muse, you'll gain access to these incredible poets PLUS a FULL YEAR of Zoom classes featuring an all-star lineup including Danusha Laméris, Susan Rich, Kelli Russell Agodon, Melissa Studdard, Lana Hechtman Ayers, Ruben Quesada, Elena Karina Byrne, Gloria J. Burgess, Luisa A. Igloria, and Jane Wong!

But that's not all! Each week, you'll also receive:
☆ Weekly poetry prompts
☆ Submission opportunities
☆ Insider publishing tips
☆ Exclusive interviews
☆ Your questions answered by our editors
☆ Your poetry news amplified to our community
☆ Journaling/creativity exercises, and more—all delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning!

PLUS 12 inspiring Zoom classes along with ongoing prompts and resources, a $2,600 value (!) for just $198 a year! (Monthly payment options available!) Sign up here.

The Weekly Muse has been called "the best poetry resource for poets publishing today!"

Sign up now and start benefiting like so many others.

P.S. The Weekly Muse is risk-free! If it's not for you, one click and you're out. Easy!

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
Andromeda Award. United Talent Agency will award $5,000 for unpublished science fiction or fantasy novels. Authors must be legal residents of the US or UK. Winning entries will be read by talent agents from the contest sponsors: literary agencies Conville & Walsh and United Talent Agency, and UK-based writing academy Curtis Brown Creative. Must be received by December 18.

Intermediate Writers
Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. The Baton Rouge Area Foundation will award $15,000 and a travel-expenses-paid trip to Baton Rouge for a novel or short story collection by an emerging African-American US citizen published during the current calendar year. Winner must participate in educational activities and small creative writing workshops with local students during the week of ceremony. Must be received by December 31.

Advanced Writers
Four Quartets Prize. The Poetry Society of America will award $21,000 for a unified and complete sequence of poems, 14 pages minimum, published in the US in a print or online journal, chapbook, or book during the current year. Postmark by December 31.

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.

• SHINE Poetry Anthology
(published or unpublished poems - rolling deadline)

• EastOver Press: Literary Nonfiction Reading Period
(book-length narrative nonfiction, literary essay collections - December 31)

• Workers Write! Tales from the Cleaners
(fiction and poetry about workers in cleaning jobs - December 31)

• fourteen poems: LGBTQ Poetry Anthology
(poems by queer authors - January 10)

• Bending Genres
(experimental and hybrid-genre poetry and short prose - February 1)

• Sundress Publications: Prose Manuscript Reading Period
(literary novels, memoirs, story and essay collections, hybrid work - February 28)

This month, editor Jendi Reiter highlights poems from around the web that have won recent prizes.

ETERNITY and THE WOMAN WITH LEAVES FOR HANDS
by Rosanna Young Oh
Winner of the 2024 North American Poetry Book Award
Postmark deadline: January 15
The Poetry Society of Virginia sponsors this $1,000 prize for poetry books published in the previous calendar year. Oh's winning collection The Corrected Version is inspired by her father, a Korean-American immigrant who loved writing but had to put it aside to support his family as a grocer. These poignant selections depict the aging man's mental decline, his thoughts becoming a kind of surreal poetry once again.

ERGOT/WESTERN WHEATGRASS
by Nathan Manley
Winner of the 2023 Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award
Entries must be received by December 30
This open poetry manuscript competition gives $1,000 and publication. Manley's Native was the most recent winner. The language of this poem about ergotism, a fungus-borne illness that is thought to have caused religious hallucinations in medieval times, is dense with texture and ornamentation like an elaborate altarpiece.

ANDREW WYETH'S FOOTNOTES TO LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON, 1992
by Janée J. Baugher
Winner of the 2023 Dorset Prize
Entries must be received by January 31
This award from prestigious publisher Tupelo Press gives $3,000 and a two-week residency in Port Angeles, WA. This ekphrastic poem from her winning collection The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles blends actual quotes from the notable American painter with imagined reflections on what he saw and felt while creating the titular picture.

AMERICAN INCOME
by Afaa M. Weaver
Co-winner of the 2024 Paterson Poetry Prize
Postmark deadline: February 1
This major award from the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College gives $2,000 for the best book of poems published in the preceding calendar year. Weaver's A Fire in the Hills (Red Hen Press) shared the most recent prize with Mahogany L. Browne's Chrome Valley (Liveright Publishing Co.). In this lyrical and compact poem from earlier in his career, Weaver riffs on the literal and metaphorical weight that Black men cannot shed in our society.

Read more award-winning work going back to 2005.

Julian Peters has kindly allowed us to reprint this 2023 holiday card for the Montreal financial services firm ASSURART. The watercolor depicts a house on Rue Rielle, in the Verdun neighborhood of Montreal. Happy holidays!

Need a last-minute gift? You can still order Poems to See By: A Comic Artist Interprets Great Poetry at a 30% discount. Use the code win30 at checkout.

Tips from a Year of Indie Book Marketing
My resolution for 2024 was "Appreciate those who appreciate me." I resolved to manifest "satisfaction" as well as "success" and let the former be a touchstone for the latter. We can always make ourselves dissatisfied chasing more fame, more sales, more recognition from people we think are more important than ourselves. To step off this treadmill can feel abandoning ambition, because we're unaccustomed to trusting that we'll still do our work if not driven by fear and lack.

[read more]

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