We are excited to announce that the ASF Short Story Contest opened for submissions on February 26th. This year we are honored to have Amy Hempel as our guest judge. We have extended the contest’s entry deadline to June 15th. (Note: Original deadline was June 1st.)
General Guidelines
– Submit your entry online between February 26, 2014 – June 15, 2014.
– The first-place winner will receive a $1,000 prize and publication in our Fall issue. One runner-up will receive $500 and all entries will be considered for publication.
– 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 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 We accept only previously unpublished work.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. Winners will be announced in August.
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.
Amy Hempel is the author Reasons to Live, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Tumble Home and The Dog of the Marriage. She has been awarded the Rea Award for the Short Story, the PEN/MALAMUD short story award, and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her collected works, published in 2006, was named a best book of the year by The New York Times, Newsweek, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle and Time Out New York.
Of the writing process, Ms. Hempel has said:
“There’s no method. There’s no formula. If you really proceed a sentence at a time, if you pay attention to the sentence you just wrote and look to it for the clue for what to do to the next sentence, you can inch your way along to what may be a story. … You look back at what you gave yourself to work with. Sharon Olds said something beautiful about sometimes thinking of her poems as instructions for how to put the world back together if it were destroyed. Or another way of doing it—to live in the “two landscapes” of that Charles Wright poem. “One that is eternal and divine / and one that’s just the back yard.”
Perhaps that lovely advice can encourage you as you work on your submissions. Good luck!
EXTENDED ENTRY DEADLINE: June 15, 2014.