Submissions
Our general submission period is now closed. Thank you for sharing your writing! We reopen for our literary contest submissions on February 1, 2025.
About our 2025 literary contests:
Three prizes of $1,000 each and publication in Bellingham Review are given annually for works of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. The 49th Paallel Award for Poetry is given for a poem or group of poems. The Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction is given for a short story or a work of flash fiction. The Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction is given for an essay or a work of flash nonfiction. English translations of works originally written in another language are accepted. Using only the online submission system, submit up to three poems of any length, three pieces of flash fiction or nonfiction of up to 1,500 words each, or a story or essay of up to 4,000 words with a $15 entry fee. Contest submissions are open from February 1st to March 15th. All entries are considered for publication. See below for our guest judges and Submittable for complete guidelines.
POETRY:
Gabrielle Bates is the author of Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023), an NPR Best Book of 2023, a New York Times Book Review Critics Pick, and finalist for the Washington State Book Award in Poetry. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, she currently lives in Seattle, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium and co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere, and she has served as visiting faculty for a variety of universities, arts organizations, and museums, including the University of Washington Rome Center and the Tin House Writers’ Workshops.
FICTION:
Laura Chow Reeve is the author of the short story collection A Small Apocalypse. Her writing and graphic work can be found in The Offing, Lit Hub, The Rumpus, Catapult, Joyland, and elsewhere. She is a winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and was a Blackburn Fellow at the Randolph College MFA program. She lives in Richmond, VA.
NONFICTION:
Lilly Dancyger is the author of First Love: Essays on Friendship, and Negative Space. Her work has been published by The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Playboy, Rolling Stone, among others, and she writes the Substack newsletter The Word Cave. Dancyger lives in New York City, and teaches creative nonfiction in the MFA programs at Columbia University and Randolph College.
