Our 2023 Literary Contests are Open

We are excited to announce our 2023 judges: Susan Nguyen (Poetry), Sasha LaPointe (Creative Nonfiction), and Corinne Manning (Fiction)!

Susan Nguyen’s debut poetry collection Dear Diaspora (University of Nebraska Press 2021) won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, and was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize and have appeared or are forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, The American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, Tin House, diagram, and elsewhere. The recipient of fellowships from the AZ Commission on the Arts, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and the 2022 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, she currently serves as the senior editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review.

Sasha LaPointe is from the Upper Skagit and Nooksack Indian Tribe. Native to the Pacific Northwest, she draws inspiration from her coastal heritage as well as her life in the city. She writes with a focus on trauma and resilience, ranging topics from PTSD, sexual violence, the work her great grandmother did for the Lushootseed language revitalization, to loud basement punk shows and what it means to grow up mixed heritage. With strange obsessions revolving around Twin Peaks, the Seattle music scene, and Coast Salish Salmon Ceremonies, Sasha explores her own truth of indigenous identity in the Coast Salish territory. Her memoir Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk was published by Counterpoint Press. Her collection of poetry, Rose Quartz, will be published by Milkweed in Spring 2023.

Corinne Manning‘s debut story collection WE HAD NO RULES has received starred reviews from Booklist and Publisher’s Weekly, the latter noting it “exquisitely examines queer relationships with equal parts humor, heartache, and titillation.”  They are a fiction writer and essayist, a two-time MacDowell Fellow and a collective member of The Anarchist Review of Books.

Thrilled to have these wonderful three writers as guest judges! First-place prizes will be award $1,000. $15 entry fee. All entries will be considered for publication. Recent past winners include Jamila Osman, Traci Brimhall, and Esther Ra. Please see our Submittable for specific guidelines. Looking forward to reading!