**The 2018 Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize entry period has now closed.**
The deadline for our brand new Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize was June 15, 2018. The winner of the prize will receive $2,500 and publication in an upcoming issue of American Short Fiction.
We’re kicking things off with a bang as our inaugural judge will be the incomparable ZZ Packer, whose writing has been hailed by everyone from John Updike to Oprah. George Saunders called Packer a wonderful writer “who somehow manages to indict the species and forgive it all at once.” We are so pleased and honored to have her as our first ever judge for this prize.
General Guidelines
– Submit your entry online between March 8, 2018 and June 15, 2018.
– 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 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 We accept only previously unpublished work.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.
ZZ Packer is the author of the short story collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, a finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award and a New York Times Notable Book in 2004. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta and Best American Short Stories. She’s been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and Radcliffe Institute and has been recognized as a 5 Under 35 writer by the National Book Foundation and a 20 Under 40 author by The New Yorker. She has taught at Princeton as a Hodder Fellow, the Michener Center at the University of Texas, Austin and, most recently, at San Francisco State University. She is currently at work on a novel, The Thousands, which explores the lives of former Louisiana slaves moving out west.
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, we encourage you to click on to see in its full glory, will be published by the University of Texas Press in May.
