We had so much fun reading for this unique contest! The collision of nature and humanity was felt throughout every story in this contest! Here are our longlisted titles of 34 stories we couldn’t let go of! We’ll have our shortlisted titles out in the next week, and those will be shipped off with care […]

Here are the excerpts moving on to the shortlist and for Judge Cynthia Pelayo’s review! Congratulations to the 15 writers on this list!

We’re so excited to announce the winners of this contest! It’s not easy to tell a story in the flash form, let alone as a genre story, which usually needs some, if not a lot, of world-building. We hope you enjoy these little, but bright starbursts of stories. 1st Place: There Must Be Something Left […]

Our shortest stories of the year are down to the shortlist! It wasn’t easy (and it never is), but we’re excited for these writers! We’ll be back shortly with the winners!

This doesn’t get any easier, narrowing down a large pool of good novel excerpts to a longlist of pieces we wanted to keep reading, with characters we grew to care about in 5,000 words or less. Congratulations to the 31 writers on this list!

So many of our writers and editors love flash fiction, so this is always one of our favorite contests each year. It’s so fun to see these genres played out in stories of so few words! Compression is a great way to increase not only the resonance, but also the creativity in what to leave […]

This contest is quickly becoming one of our favorites! There’s just something immediate about a short story that creates its world through cinematic craft moves and detail-rich writing! Judge Rachel Harrison chose three winners, and we decided to publish two others that we couldn’t let go! And congratulations to everyone on the shortlist. We read […]

Congratulations to our three co-winners chosen by Judge Laird Barron! See below for the reveal of the shortlisted authors. We hope these manuscripts find great homes in the future! The Co-Winners: The Sailor by K. Wallace King “Redolent of Ellroy and Chandler, but stripped down. Lean, mean, and to the point. I loved the sense […]