We found over four dozen excellent free poetry and prose contests with deadlines between November 15-December 31. In this issue, Jim Avis animates Julian Peters' illustrations of "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower" by Dylan Thomas.

This month's Annie Mydla column draws on her experience of evaluating thousands of books for the North Street Book Prize. For many books, a big problem is that the main character is bland, conforming to tropes that have become overused. Annie describes 10 mental traps that catch authors and how to escape them.

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.

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Deadline: November 30 (midnight GMT)

Prize Fund : €6,000 (equates approx to US$6,000)

For the opportunity to have your short story published in the Fish Anthology 2025, enter the Fish Short Story Prize. Ten stories will be selected for publication.

Judge: Sean Lusk, winner of the Manchester Fiction Prize, the Fish Short Story Prize, and second prizes in the Bridport and Tom-Gallon Trust awards

Word Limit: 5,000
Results: 17 March '25
Anthology Published: July '25
Entry Fees: €22 for first entry (€14 each additional)
€22 equates approximately to US$23 or £18
Optional critique €58

The ten winning stories will be published in the Fish Anthology 2025.

• 1st prize: €3,000 and five-day Short Story Workshop at the West Cork Literary Festival
• 2nd prize: Online Writing Course + €300
• 3rd prize: €300
• 7 Honourable Mentions €200 each

SUBMIT ONLINE OR BY MAIL

See also the Fish Publishing
Short Story Writing Course
This online program offers both new and experienced writers an extensive range of creative ideas and activities to help develop their craft. Course tutor Mary-Jane Holmes will be on hand to offer advice on mastering technique and developing personal style. Each module concentrates on a key aspect of the form, such as shape and structure, narrative perspective and characterization. By the end of the program you will have completed a polished work of short fiction that will be submitted for the next Fish Short Story Prize.

• 10 separate modules
• complete at your convenience within five months
• prompt, one-to-one feedback from an engaging writing professional

Learn more about the course.

Congratulations to Joan Gelfand, Lesléa Newman, Matthew E. Henry, Noah Berlatsky, Carol D. Marsh, Cheryl J. Fish, Remi Recchia, Ruth Thompson, Eva Tortora, and Annie Dawid.

Winning Writers editor Jendi Reiter's poems "Portrait of a Marriage" and "These Characters and Themes Cannot Exist" were published in The Garlic Press, Issue #3 (Fall 2024).

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!

Final Deadline: November 30!

Hollywood has adapted countless movies and TV pilots from great short stories. Our judges are looking for stories with potential to be adapted for the screen. We're looking for true and fictional stories, everything from full-length novels to novellas under 20,000 words.

Benefits include:

• Grand Prize Winners will receive an opportunity to develop their project with a manager at Intellectual Property Group.
• One selected winner will get their story produced with innovative multimedia company Crazy Maple.
• Winners and select finalists receive introductions to book agents, literary managers, producers, and more.

This could be your chance to see your story come to life in a new and dynamic way. Learn more and submit!

The Two Sylvias Press Online Poetry Prompt Advent Calendar is filled with surprise prompts to help you write new poems throughout December!

Our Online Poetry Prompt Advent Calendar is perfect for ALL levels of poets or anyone interested in exploring their own creativity! Each day from December 1st, click on the calendar date to reveal a unique, bite-sized prompt—no more than three sentences—to inspire a fresh poem. Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned writer, each prompt is crafted to spark your creativity and help you build a daily writing habit.

Miss a day? No worries! Once unlocked, all prompts remain accessible, so you can explore them at your own pace throughout December and even into January.

You'll receive your exclusive access code at the end of November, with prompts ready to explore from December 1st.

Share the gift of poetry! Our Poetry Prompt Advent Calendar makes a thoughtful present for the poet in your life—or yourself! (See our website for more details.)

To see a sample prompt and order your Advent Calendar, please visit Two Sylvias Press.

Unwrap inspiration all season long!

At this time of year, I'm deep into writing feedback for North Street Book Prize entrants. Among other things, this means meeting a lot of empty-feeling main characters over and over again. It's all but impossible for a book to recover from a bland protagonist. No matter how strong the other narrative elements are, an empty main will leech a book of all immersivity. Here are 10 mental traps that catch authors...

[read more]

Unlock your manuscript's potential with our Beta Reader Matching Program, hosted by History Through Fiction. Join our first quarter cycle (January-March 2025) and gain invaluable feedback from fellow writers.

How It Works:

1. Complete Our Form: Share your style, genre, and manuscript details to find your perfect match.
2. Mutual Exchange: Submit your manuscript and become a beta reader, exchanging insights and perspectives.
3. Learn from Jillian Forsberg: Attend a workshop on effective beta reading, hosted by the author of The Rhino Keeper.
4. Discover Your Match: Get paired with a fellow writer-reader and receive guiding questions for your review.
5. Connect and Reflect: After 3 months, join us for a debrief and social hour to share experiences and network.

Join us to refine your skills, polish your manuscript, and connect with like-minded creatives. Let's turn your manuscript into a masterpiece, together. Register now.

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: January 6, 2025

Submissions are now open 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.

• Prize: $2,500 honorarium and publication
• Reading fee: $28 (includes a one-year subscription to Colorado Review)
• Submit: 48 to 100-page poetry manuscript

The Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University is seeking submissions to the Colorado Prize for Poetry until January 14th, allowing for a five-day grace period. Authors do not need to reside in Colorado or the United States. Our final judge will be Craig Morgan Teicher.

The Colorado Prize for Poetry is an international poetry book manuscript contest established in 1995. The winning book will be published by the Center for Literary Publishing and distributed by the University Press of Colorado in the fall of 2025. To find out what sort of work we publish, please take a look at some of our previous winners.

Manuscripts may consist of poems that have been published, but the manuscript as a whole must be unpublished. Please do not submit self-published books.

We have a limited number of fee waivers available for writers experiencing financial hardship. Email creview@colostate.edu directly to request one of these waivers.

Find out more on our website and submit online via Submittable.

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 2023 winner George Bilgere. It appears in Cheap Motels of My Youth, published by Rattle in 2024.

Abandoned Bicycle

A bicycle—a nice one—
has been locked to the lamp post
all summer and fall.

Tires gone flat.
A congregation of leaves
worshipping the wheels.

And on the brake levers
and the tiny bolts
that held the seat exactly
where someone wanted it to be,
rust is constructing
its sprawling embassies.

Maybe a drunk drifted
over yellow lines. A clot
formed in the thigh
and moved north.
Or somebody just got
sick and tired.

Anyway, the bike is waiting.
Its metals gleam urgently.

Soon the scavengers will come.
The pedals—unable to live
without each other—will vanish
into a fresh new marriage.

The seat will disappear
into a seat-shaped abyss.

One night, someone
will help himself to a wheel.
Not quite a bicycle,
but a start.

And the bike,
like an abandoned person,
will become a clock,
calibrated to measure
the precise duration
of loneliness.

An international move is a big step that invites many questions:

• What impact will it have on your family?
• Is having a close community important to you?
• Can you afford it? (It might be less costly than you think.)

I can help. I'm Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels, author of Migrants or Expatriates? Americans in Europe. For 20 years, I have studied the experiences of US citizens living overseas, publishing widely, and have myself lived in Europe since 1996.

Drawing on my professional expertise and personal experience, I can help you decide if moving is right for you. If it is, I will help you to develop and implement a plan. I listen and ask informed questions to help you make a confident decision. Email me at amanda@kvkpathways.com to set up a free 20-minute consultation.

"Amanda helped me investigate my European citizenship options and is ready to help me if I want to take next steps. She’s been kind, helpful, and very affordable." -J.

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
Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers. High school sophomores and juniors throughout the world can win free tuition to The Kenyon Review's two-week summer seminar for writers aged 16-18; winner and runners-up also published in the highly prestigious journal. Submit one poem via their online form. Must be received by November 30.

Intermediate Writers
Queen's Knickers Award. The Society of Authors awards a top prize of 5,000 pounds to the author and illustrator of a children's illustrated book for ages 0-7 (any combination of words and/or pictures, or just pictures) that "strikes a quirky, new note and grabs the attention of a child ... [via] curiosity, amusement, horror, or excitement". Work must have been first published in the UK and Republic of Ireland between September 1 of the previous year to August 31 of the deadline year. Submissions must be made by the print publisher. Must be received by November 30.

Advanced Writers
Griffin Poetry Prize. The Griffin Trust will award C$130,000 for English-language poetry books published anywhere in the world in the current calendar year, as well as C$10,000 for shortlisted entries and a debut Canadian author. This is one of the most lucrative poetry prizes, as well as one of the most prestigious. Translations are eligible, with the prize split between author and translator. Publisher submits. Books published between July 1-December 31, 2024 must be received by December 20.

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.

• Four Way Books: Fiction Open Reading Period
(literary novels, novellas, and story collections - November 30)

• Mayday: Poetry and Translations
(literary journal of culture and politics is open to poetry, translations, and reviews and essays relevant to translated literature - November 30)

• Sinister Wisdom: "Barbie: The Movie" Issue
(lesbian-feminist creative writing and art about the Barbie movie - December 1)

• EastOver Press: Literary Nonfiction Reading Period
(manuscripts of narrative nonfiction or literary essay collections - December 31)

This month, editor Jendi Reiter presents selected books that deserve your attention. There are many more in our Books resource section. Winning Writers earns a small commission from books sold by Amazon.

Eli Cranor
DON'T KNOW TOUGH
This heart-wrenching novel limns American toxic masculinity and small-town desperation. Billy Lowe is a small-town Arkansas football star who's only ever known abuse and poverty. His response to everything is violence, but deep down he wants to be a better person. His Coach thinks of himself as a heroic Christian mentor, but when it comes down to it, his savior complex and selfishness get in the way. Coach's daughter is the one who actually understands the meaning of sacrificial compassion. She not only sees Billy's innocent soul but is willing to share his stigmatized and dangerous existence in order to reach him. Their unlikely friendship revolves around literature. If anything can give Billy the self-awareness to break intergenerational patterns, it might be a book.

Deesha Philyaw
THE SECRET LIVES OF CHURCH LADIES
These bittersweet stories immerse the reader in the lives of Black women struggling against patriarchy and hypocrisy. Mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and secret queer lovers weigh the risks of authentic intimacy versus passing on patterns of repression to the next generation in order to keep them safe. Philyaw's debut book was a National Book Award finalist and a PEN/Faulkner Prize winner.

Carl Siciliano
MAKING ROOM: THREE DECADES OF FIGHTING FOR BEDS, BELONGING, AND A SAFE SPACE FOR LGBTQ YOUTH
This luminous memoir by the founder of the Ali Forney Center, the nation's first homeless shelter for queer and trans teens, is both a spiritual autobiography and an incisive social history of the 1980s-90s. Siciliano shows how we could save children's lives with a small fraction of our city and state budgets, yet often ignore this population because of racism, queerphobia, and even respectability politics in the gay community. Moreover, the problem would not exist on such a huge scale without hateful theology from Christian institutions that causes families to throw their queer kids out on the streets. Siciliano poignantly describes a lifelong struggle with his Catholic faith. The church is responsible for a great deal of abuse, but the tradition also gave him role models for a life of sacred service, like St. Francis and Dorothy Day. As a spiritual touchstone, the author returns to memories of Ali Forney, a murdered genderqueer teen, drug user and survival sex worker, who proclaimed unshakeable confidence in God's love.

Donald Mengay
OJO
In this Joycean novel about queer life in the American West, a young man flees his repressive Cleveland suburb and the ghost of his first lover, to find himself as an artist in a trailer on the edge of the Colorado desert. In the small town of Ojo Caliente, Jake's unlikely family-of-choice comes to include a swinging pastor and his lesbian wife's feminist book club, a construction worker torn between his passion for Jake and his comically fertile wife, and an assertive Latino lover who lives in a household of sharp-tongued trans femmes. This fragile utopia is further riven by the advent of AIDS, yet sensuality and farcical humor leaven the grief. Reading this multivocal, stream-of-consciousness story is like overhearing tantalizing snippets of strangers' conversations on a long train ride. One gradually learns to recognize their voices without context or transitions, and the close attention required to follow the narrative makes its scenes that much more memorable. Ojo is the second book in a planned trilogy that began with The Lede to Our Undoing.

Julian Peters presents "A video interpretation by Jim Avis of my comics adaptation of one of Dylan Thomas's first poems. Featuring a stirring reading by the poet himself."

The original comics adaptation, along with 23 others, appears in Poems to See By: A Comic Artist Interprets Great Poetry. Now for a limited time, you can order this book for yourself and your friends at a 30% discount. Use the code win30 at checkout.

Resources for Resistance
Abuse, dysphoria, and the pandemic taught me something about staying present in a crisis I can't control. I've learned not to talk myself out of the future I want, even when it seems impossible. Yes, it is going to be that bad, and no, I don't know what to do about it, except keep being queer and making art until it's really obvious that someone will kill me for it (and maybe even then). That's my version of not obeying tyranny in advance.

[read more]

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