Ninth Letter 2023 Literary Awards
Ninth Letter is pleased to announce our tenth annual Literary Awards call for submissions! We'll be accepting entries from March 8, 2023 to April 30, 2023 for our Literary Awards in three categories: Fiction, Poetry, and Creative Nonfiction.
Prize: The winner in each genre will receive $1000, publication in the Fall/Winter 2023-24 print issue, and bragging rights. Our publication fee purchases first North American print rights only; all other rights are retained by the author.
General Guidelines: All entries should include the author's name, contact information and title(s) of work submitted in the "Cover Letter" field in Submittable. Submissions are read anonymously, so neither the author's name nor any identifying information should appear on the manuscript itself. Acceptable file formats are .pdf, .doc, .docx.
Prose Guidelines: Please submit one piece of no more than 8,000 words. You may also submit up to three pieces of flash-fiction or flash-nonfiction as long as the total word count of the submission is no more than 8,000 words.
Poetry Guidelines: Please submit up to three poems in a single file of no more than six pages.
Submission Fee: There is an $18 submission fee for each entry. You are welcome to send multiple submissions in multiple categories provided a fee is paid for each entry. All U.S. entrants will receive a one-year subscription to Ninth Letter. All international entrants will receive a copy of our Fall/Winter 2023-24 print issue. Payments are accepted via Submittable.
Mail Submissions: Submissions sent by mail should be accompanied by check or money order made to Ninth Letter. No manuscripts will be returned so please do not send your only copy. Submissions sent via email will not be considered.
Simultaneous Submissions: Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please withdraw your submission immediately upon acceptance elsewhere. Neither Refunds nor replacement submissions will be offered.
Eligibility: No current students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign or students associated with the school in the past five years are eligible to submit. Likewise, any entrants with a close relationship with the genre's judge are not eligible to submit.
Our esteemed guest judges for this year's awards are Chet'la Sebree (poetry), Janisse Ray (creative nonfiction), and Robin Marie MacArthur (fiction).
Chet'la Sebree is an Assistant Professor of English at George Washington University. She is the author of Field Study (FSG Originals, June 2021), winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American, and Mistress, selected by Cathy Park Hong as the winner of the 2018 New Issues Poetry Prize and nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work-Poetry (2020).
Robin Marie MacArthur lives on the hillside farm where she was born in Southern Vermont. Her debut collection of short stories, HALF WILD, won the 2017 PEN New England Award for Fiction and was a finalist for both the New England Book Award and the Vermont Book Award. Her novel, HEART SPRING MOUNTAIN, was an IndieNext Selection and a finalist for the New England Book Award. Both of her books have been translated into French and published by Albin Michel. She teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts’ MFA in Writing and has taught in many non-traditional settings including the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference and Orion Magazine. She is the founder and director of Word House, an emerging writing space in southern Vermont; her essays and stories have appeared in Orion Magazine, LitHub, Hunger Mountain, The Washington Post, Shenandoah, Alaska Quarterly, and on NPR.
