We are thrilled to announce that the brilliant Karen Russell—author of the novels Sleep Donation and Swamplandia! and the story collections Vampires in the Lemon Grove, Orange World, and St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves—will judge our 2023 American Short(er) Fiction Prize. The prize recognizes extraordinary short fiction under 1,000 words. The first-place winner will receive a $1,000 prize and publication. Previous winners of the Short(er) Fiction Prize have gone on to be anthologized in places such as The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. All entries will be considered for publication.
General Guidelines
• Submit your entry online between November 15, 2022 – February 15, 2023
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• The first-place winner will receive a $1,000 prize and publication in a future issue of ASF. All entries will be considered for publication.
• Please submit your $18 entry fee and your work through Submittable. We no longer accept submissions by post. International submissions in English are eligible.
• Stories must be 1,000 words or fewer. You are allowed to include up to three stories per entry. Please submit all stories in one document. Each story must begin on a new page and be clearly titled. For the title of your submission list the story titles, separated by a comma. 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 We accept only previously unpublished work.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.
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Karen Russell is the author of three story collections, most recently Orange World and Other Stories, the novella Sleep Donation, and the novel Swamplandia!, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, winner of the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and one of The New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2011. She has received a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim award and is a former fellow of the NYPL Cullman Center and the American Academy in Berlin. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, son, and daughter.
About short stories, Russell has said, “the pleasure as a reader is having this experience that is quite intense and distilled, and you’re often able to finish them in one sitting. They stay inside you in a different way. They have a different kind of geometry inside you, and that’s what I love. I think as a writer, what helps me is that you cordon off this landscape where you can explore a single question or a single idea. You can have a premise that you spin out almost like a science experiment. You have your counter-factual reality, and those constraints help a lot . . . Short stories have a different impact in part because they work almost like a poem does. They have that compaction.” With those words of inspiration and encouragement, good luck!
We can’t wait for your submissions!