Tuesday, April 03, 2012

The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction 2012 competition is now accepting submissions

The Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction is now accepting submissions for the 2012 competition! Please visit our website for guidelines and more information. Manuscripts may be submitted until 9:00 a.m. on June 1st.

The Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction was established in the early eighties to encourage gifted emerging writers by bringing their work to a national readership. Since then, over 60 short-story collections have appeared in the series. Winners of the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction include such widely read authors as Ha Jin, Antonya Nelson, Rita Ciresi, and Mary Hood.

This year’s competition will be judged by H. G. Carrillo, Susan Taylor Chehak, Kirsten Ogden, Edwin M. Steckevicz, Lori White, Gail Galloway Adams, and series editor Nancy Zafris. You can read more about each of the judges here.

The authors of the two winning manuscripts each receive a cash prize of $1,000 and their collections are subsequently published by the University of Georgia Press under a standard book contract.

Please note that we are only accepting electronic submissions for the 2012 competition. Our online submissions manager is available here.

For more on the 2011 winners:

Melinda Moustakis, author of BEAR DOWN, BEAR NORTH

In her debut collection, Melinda Moustakis brings to life a rough-and-tumble family of Alaskan homesteaders through a series of linked stories.

Amina Gautier, author of AT-RISK

Gautier’s stories explore the lives of young African Americans who might all be classified as “at-risk,” yet who encounter different opportunities and dangers in their particular neighborhoods and schools and who see life through the lens of different family experiences.