Wordstock Short Fiction Competition
Wordstock, Portland's annual festival of writers, books, and storytelling, is pleased to announce the call for submissions for the 4th Wordstock Short Fiction Competition.
The national contest is a "double blind" competition. The judges, a collection of writers, academics, publishers, bookstore owners, and literary critics, will choose 10 finalists. The winner of the competition receives a first prize of $1,000 and publication in the October 2010 issue of Portland Monthly magazine. All 10 finalists' stories will be published in the Wordstock Ten, an anthology that will be available at the festival, at Portland-area bookstores, and online through the Wordstock website. Every writer who enters the competition will receive a copy of the anthology.
The final judge for this year's competition will be fiction writer and essayist Charles D'Ambrosio. D'Ambrosio is widely recognized as one of the US's preeminent writers of contemporary fiction, and is a regular contributor to The New Yorker. He as been a finalist for both the PEN/Hemingway and PEN/Faulkner awards, and has received a Whiting Writers' Award, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and a USA Rasmuson Fellowship. He most recently taught writing at the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop, of which he is a graduate. He lives in Portland and is teaches in the MFA program at Portland State University.
Submission guidelines
- All short stories must be works of fiction written in English
- Stories must be an original work and not previously published
- The entry fee is $25 per short story entry
- There are no genre restrictions, and comics are acceptable
- Manuscripts are to be typed, double-spaced, on 8.5" x 11" paper
- Stories should be no less than 1,500 and no more than 3,000 words
- Each submission must have a cover sheet with the writer's contact informationdo not put this information on the manuscript.
- No manuscript will be returned
- Entries that do not follow these guidelines will be disqualified
Submit your entry by mail to:
Wordstock Short Fiction Competition
810 SE Belmont St., Studio 5
Portland, Oregon 97214
Please make your entry fee check payable to Wordstock. All entries must be postmarked by June 30, 2010.