***The 2019 Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize has closed for submissions. Thank you to everyone who submitted their work. Keep your eyes out for the winner in an upcoming issue of American Short Fiction.***
We’re so happy to announce that our judge for this year’s prize will be the wonderful Rebecca Makkai, whose wrenching, empathetic 2018 novel The Great Believers, about the AIDS crisis in 1980s Chicago, was widely and justly celebrated, including as a finalist for the National Book Award. Makkai has long been known as a master of the short form, winning four consecutive inclusions in the Best American Short Stories anthology, so we’re particularly grateful to have her as our judge this year. All submitters will receive a complimentary copy of the prize issue.
General Guidelines
– Submit your entry online between April 1, 2019 and June 1, 2019. The deadline has been extended to June 15, 2019.
– The winner will receive a $2,500 prize and publication in an upcoming issue of American Short Fiction.
– Please submit your $20 entry fee and your work through Submittable. We no longer accept submissions by post. International submissions in English are eligible. The entry fee covers one 6,500 word fiction submission. All submitters will receive a complimentary copy of the prize issue.
– All entries must be single, self-contained works of fiction, between 2,000-6,500 words. Please DO NOT include any identifying information on the manuscript itself.
– You may submit multiple entries. We accept only previously unpublished work. We do allow simultaneous submissions, but we ask that you notify us promptly of publication elsewhere.
Conflicts of Interest
Staff and volunteers currently affiliated with American Short Fiction are ineligible for consideration or publication. Additionally, students, former students, and colleagues of the judge are not eligible to enter. We ask that previous winners wait three years after their winning entry is published before entering again.
Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novel The Great Believers, one of the New York Times’ top ten books for 2018, a finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal, the ALA Stonewall Medal, and the Chicago Review of Books Award, and a pick for the New York Public Library’s 2018 Best Books. Her other books are the novels The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, and the collection Music for Wartime—four stories from which appeared in The Best American Short Stories. The recipient of a 2014 NEA Fellowship, Rebecca has taught at the Tin House Writers’ Conference and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University. She is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago. Visit her at RebeccaMakkai.com or on twitter @rebeccamakkai.
About what matters to her as a reader, Makkai has said, “There is a certain salvation to be had from recognizing the commonality of experience, especially with an author very far removed from your own world. It’s one thing to read a contemporary American writer talking about something we all agree on, like Isn’t it embarrassing how people revert to cliche when they flirt? but then you read Madame Bovary, and here’s Flaubert, one hundred and thirty years dead, making the same point with startling familiarity. And there’s a reassurance in that, this reminder that we’re not alone in the universe. I like to think it’s the same feeling early humans would have when they stumbled upon cave paintings left by earlier tribes: ‘Dude, there are other people! And they hunt mammoths just like us!’ That’s the feeling I’m after, on whatever level, when I [read]: I want to sit there wondering how the author got inside my brain.” With that advice in mind, good luck!
American Short Fiction is grateful to the Burdine Johnson Foundation for their grant in support of this prize.
As Far as You Can See: Picturing Texas, by Kenny Braun, whose beautiful photograph of Halifax Ranch, used above, was published by the University of Texas Press in May 2018.
