We are thrilled to announce that the brilliant Bret Anthony Johnston—internationally bestselling author of We Burn Daylight and Remember Me Like This and director of the Michener Center for Writers—will judge the 2026 American Short(er) Fiction Prize. The prize recognizes extraordinary short fiction under 1,500 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. The deadline to enter is February 1, 2026.
**Please note that we raised the word count from previous years from 1,000 to 1,500.**
General Guidelines
• Submit your entry online between November 20, 2025 – February 1, 2026.
• The first-place winner will receive a $1,000 prize and publication in 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 1,500 words or fewer. You are allowed to include up to two 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. (If you’ve submitted in the past, please note that we raised the word count last year from 1,000 to 1,500.)
• DO NOT include any identifying information on the manuscript itself.
• You may submit multiple entries. We accept only previously unpublished work. We 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.
American Short Fiction adheres to the CLMP Contest Code of Ethics. You can find the CLMP Code of Ethics and our contest procedures here.
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Bret Anthony Johnston is the internationally bestselling author of the novels We Burn Daylight and Remember Me Like This, the award-winning Corpus Christi: Stories, and the forthcoming Encounters with Unexpected Animals: Stories. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and the Sunday Times Short Story Award, he is the director of the Michener Center for Writers.
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In the craft essay, “Creating a Story’s Foundation,” published by Lit Hub, Bret Anthony Johnston talks about the importance of place in both fiction and skateboarding:
“‘Context makes content.’ That’s how Rodney Mullen, widely regarded as the greatest skateboarder to ever live, sums it up in one of his brainy TED Talks. In the most reductive terms, he’s saying that where you do a trick matters as much as, and quite possibly more than, the trick itself. He’s saying certain spots have the power to transfigure the essence of the trick and maybe even the skater, that there’s a kind of kinetic and architectural alchemy at play, and the product of that alchemy might accurately be called relevance. For our purposes, he’s saying: Place makes character.”
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We can’t wait to read your submissions!