Editor Interview: Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest

Contemporary short prose

New Millennium Writings, Graywolf, Sibling Rivalry Press, Barrelhouse, DIAGRAM, Saddle Road Press, Alice James Books, Tor.com, Broken Sleep Books

Some of our favorite fiction and nonfiction writers include Robert Olen Butler, Alexander Chee, Ruthanna Emrys, Garth Greenwell, Roxane Gay, Robert Jones Jr., Barbara Kingsolver, Daniel Lavery, Matt Ruff, George Saunders, Wesley Stace, and Angie Thomas.

Winning Writers accepts previously published work, unlike most other contests and journals with a similar prize pool and prestige. Our website gets 1 million page views annually, and over 100,000 Twitter followers.

Read past winners, especially those from the most recent 3-5 years, because editorial staff and tastes may have changed. Do a little research on this year's guest judge. Read the judges' essays from previous years, because we always give advice on common problems with the submissions. Be extra conscious of racial, gendered, class, body type, and mental health stereotypes (we list our pet peeves about these in the judges' essays). Don't gratuitously sexualize or exoticize your characters. A strong ending to a story doesn't have to tie up all the loose ends, but it should feel as though a central question has been settled, a definitive change has been made, or an important moment in time has concluded.

See past winners for a general idea of our tastes. We are always eager to receive more work from perspectives outside the white, cis-hetero, middle class "majority". (I put that in quotes because it is the majority in the publishing world, but not in THE world!)

Please make sure that the version you send us is the one that you want judged. We don't generally accept revisions to winning entries, and we prefer not to spend extra time making corrections to entries during the judging period.

All entries are judged anonymously.

We don't read every single piece all the way through (I doubt that any contest does). How much we read depends on the individual screener and the quality of those first paragraphs. A first page with a lot of typos or cliches will usually knock you out of the running. Other times, we have to read all the way through to see if you stick the ending. Finalists will be read in full by the screener and the final judge.

First-round screeners look at each piece. The final judge reads some or all of each piece on the shortlist that the screeners put forward. I may consult with the final judge about the rankings of their top picks and whether to add extra runners-up.

I'm not active in the judging of this contest, so the best way to get a feel for the process is to read our interview with the judge and their comments on past years' winners.

We don't believe in editing accepted work, except to clear up minor typos. Out of fairness to the other entrants, we have to take the piece as we find it, not as we wish it could be. The author has final say on suggested fixes.

We nominate our winners for Best of the Net, and are happy to nominate for other eligible awards that the author may suggest. Jocelyn Pihlaja's "Family, Edited" was a 2016 Best of the Net essay that we nominated: http://www.sundresspublications.com/bestof/2016/pihlaja.htm