Contests

Click the links below for individual contest guidelines.

The Winter Fiction Contest Guidelines Judge: Peter Orner Peter Orner was born in Chicago and is the author of the novel, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (Little, Brown, 2006), and the story collection, Esther Stories (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, a San Francisco Chronicle Best-Seller, won the Bard Fiction Prize and is being translated into French, Italian, and German. The novel is set in Namibia where Orner lived and worked in the early 1990's. Esther Stories was awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction, and was a Finalist for the Pen Hemingway Award. Orner has published fiction in the Atlantic Monthly , The Paris Review, McSweeney's , The Southern Review , and various other publications. Stories have been anthologized in Best American Stories and the Pushcart Prize Annual. In 2006, Orner was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Currently, Orner is on leave from San Francisco State University and living in up-state New York where he is writer-in-residence at Bard College.

The Greg Grummer Poetry Award Judge: Peter Gizzi Peter Gizzi's books include "The Outernationale" (Wesleyan, 2007), "Some Values of Landscape and Weather" (Wesleyan, 2003), "Artificial Heart" (Burning Deck, 1998), and "Periplum and Other Poems 1987-1992" (Salt Publishing, 2004). His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets (1994), and fellowships in poetry from the Howard Foundation (1998), The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (1999), and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2005). He is also the editor of "The House That Jack Built: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer" (Wesleyan, 1998). He currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.