2021 Literary Contests

Submissions to our annual literary contests open Dec.1. 

We offer three $1,000-dollar first-place prizes for fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. The final judges for the 2020 literary contests are:

• Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction: Kristiana Kahakauwila
• 49th Parallel Award for Poetry: Jessica Jacobs
• Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction: Sarah Einstein

Dedicated to forming a community of writers, Bellingham Review also offers continual support to our authors through interviews, book reviews, social media promotion, and endless words of encouragement. Winners of the 2021 contests will be notified in June 2021. Winning entries and many runners up will be published in the Spring 2022 print edition, Issue 84.

The cost to enter is $20. International entries are $30 to cover increased shipping costs. An entry consists of one essay, one story, up to three pieces of flash, or up to three poems. Please limit prose to 4,000 words. For prose that is 1,500 words or fewer, submit up to three in one entry. (These flash prose pieces will be considered individually, unless they are connected.)

Please upload your entries via Submittable. Paper submissions will not be read, nor will they be returned, though they will be recycled. All submissions must be previously unpublished in North America. All manuscripts will be read blindly; readers and editors will not see a contestant’s name or cover letter. The author’s name must not appear anywhere on the manuscript (or in the filename).