Open to any current or former Solo Mom

NO ENTRY FEE $500, $350 & $150 prizes for 1st, 2nd & 3rd place in each category

Deadline: May 30, 2015

Submissions will be judged anonymously. The nine award winners will be announced on June 15, 2015

Submissions can be in any style, but should be thematically linked to, or inspired by, the experience of parenting on your own. We are looking for well-crafted, authentic, and imaginative essays, short fiction, and poems that reveal, surprise, and make us think. All submissions will also be considered for publication on the ESME site.

We are proud to present our judge Goldie Goldbloom, a Solo Mom, novelist, and short-story writer. Goldbloom’s critically acclaimed novel The Paperbark Shoe won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Fiction in 2008.

Guidelines: Non-fiction essays/memoirs: 500-1,500 words Short stories (fictional): no more than 7,500 words Poetry: 1 or 2 poems, maximum 2 pages each

The work should be previously unpublished. Please send no more than 2 entries per genre at a time. All submissions must be double-spaced (single-spaced for poetry) and in 12 pt. font, with 1-inch margins on all sides. Include a cover page with your name and the title(s) of your work; do not include your name on subsequent pages. To submit, please email us your work as a PDF attachment. Please write Poetry, Essay, or Fiction Contest in the subject line and include a short bio in the body of the email.