Information about the contest:
For this contest, NDR seeks manuscripts of 20-40 pages. We welcome submissions of poetry, fiction and nonfiction, in addition to cross- and a-genre work. We’re particularly interested in works that push against traditional understandings of literature and art, of their capacities. Our Eighth Annual Chapbook Competition is judged by the amazingly talented Selah Saterstrom, whose work summons fiction via divination, challenges traditional logic of the essay, and utilizes hybridity as a mode of transgressing normative power structures in writing.
Judge: Selah Saterstrom
Prize: $250, publication, and 25 author copies
Deadline: January 10, 2019
Entry Fee: $17 ($8 from December 26-January 2)
Submit here!
Additional Submission Guidelines
- All entries must be previously unpublished and original work of the entrant.
- All submissions require a $17 ($8 from December 26-January 2) entry fee and must be entered through Submittable.
- Manuscripts should be 20-40 pages in length and should include a title page with contact information.
- Multiple submissions require separate entry fees.
- Simultaneous submissions are welcome on the condition that you notify us of an acceptance as soon as possible.
- Submissions will first be reviewed by our staff before finalists are passed on to our judge.
- Family, friends, and previous students of the judge are ineligible for participation in the contest. Current students and faculty of LSU are ineligible.
About this year’s judge:
Selah Saterstrom Selah Saterstrom is the author of the novels Slab, The Meat and Spirit Plan, The Pink Institution, and Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics, which was selected as the 2015 Essay Book Prize. She is on faculty in the creative writing program at the University of Denver.
About last year’s winning chapbook and author:
Dana Diehl earned her MFA in Fiction at Arizona State University and her BA in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University. She is the author of Our Dreams Might Align (Jellyfish Highway Press, 2016). The collection is scheduled for republication from Splice UK in April 2018. Dana has taught Composition, Creative Writing, and Humanities at Arizona State University, Florence Prison, the National University of Singapore, and BASIS Tucson Primary. Her work has appeared or forthcoming in North American Review, Passages North, Booth, The Offing, and elsewhere. She lives in Tucson, AZ.
Of TV Girls, Chen Chen writes:
“The TV girls tell us they’re ready to rappel down skyscrapers for love.’ Dana Diehl’s collection of very short and very media-obsessed stories is witty, oddball, frequently hilarious, and always memorable. The title story alone made this fiction writer turned poet want to return to his first love. Story after story, Diehl discovers fraught vulnerabilities and startling truths in the lives of girls and women confronting the expectations of TV, lovers, family, and one another. ‘You decide you will buy a house for all of the worst case scenarios,’ Diehl writes, then shows us how impossible it is to find that house, how strange it is to long for both the sanctuary and the danger.”
See a list of our past winners and judges here.