American Short Fiction Contest #seanocarolan.com #Writing #contest

American Short Fiction Contest


We are excited to announce that the ASF Short Story Contest opened for submissions on March 15. This year we are honored to have the fabulous author (and latest winner of the Story Prize) Elizabeth McCracken as our guest judge.


General Guidelines

- Submit your entry online between March 15, 2015 – June 15, 2015.

- The first-place winner will receive a $1,000 prize and publication in our spring issue. One runner-up will receive $500 and all entries will be considered for publication.

- Please submit your $20 entry fee and your work through Submittable. We no longer accept submissions by post. International submissions in English are eligible. The entry fee covers one 6,500 word fiction submission.

- All entries must be single, self-contained works of fiction, between 2,000-6,500 words. Please DO NOT include any identifying information on the manuscript itself.

- You may submit multiple entries. We accept only previously unpublished work. We do 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.




Elizabeth McCracken is the author of five books:Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry (stories), the novelsThe Giant’s House and Niagara Falls All Over Again, the memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, and the collection Thunderstruck & Other Stories, for which she was just awarded the 2015 Story Prize. She’s received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Liguria Study Center, the American Academy in Berlin, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

She has taught creative writing at Western Michigan University, the University of Oregon, the University of Houston, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She holds the James A. Michener Chair in Fiction at the University of Texas, Austin.

In her novel The Giant’s House, McCracken characterized the relationship between readers and the books in their hands as a kind of intimate, resilient alliance: “given even the worst of circumstances, they get together. In the privacy of their own homes or on park benches or on public buses, in the corner of the reference room, at the end of an aisle of fiction, in the middle of the alphabet, they club up and conspire.” But for McCracken, the relationship is really more a romance than anything else, a true affair of the heart. Her work is as widely praised for its natural warmth as for its unmistakeable wit. Of her own fiction writing, she has said: “I am writing love letters to diaries and post-it notes and telegrams and birthday cards. I am writing love letters to love letters.”

Perhaps that lovely advice can encourage you as you work on your submissions. Good luck!

DEADLINE: June 15, 2015.