This year the award will focus on prose. Using our Submittable portal,
submit a manuscript of fiction, nonfiction, creative nonfiction, or prose
poetry of about 7,000-12,000 words. The manuscript may be a collection
of mixed pieces–short stories, flash fictions, prose poems, essays, or a
stand-along excerpt from a longer work–but should be unified by a
common theme. We seek new, original work, though individual pieces
that have been previously published elsewhere may be included. 

The deadline for entries is July 30th, 2016. There is no entry fee.The winner will receive a $250.00 honorarium and 25 copies of the winning chapbook, which will be printed and sold on Amazon.com.

Map Literary editors will judge. Editors reserve the right to select no winner, or to select multiple winners, depending on the quality of submissions received.

Our previous winner, in the category of poetry, was Dennis Hinrichsen.
Hinrichsen’s chapbook, Electrocution, A Partial History, is available
for purchase by clicking here.Dennis Hinrichsen is the author of seven books of poetry. His most recent is Skin Music, co-winner of the 2014 Michael Waters Poetry Prize from Southern Indiana Review Press and forthcoming in autumn 2015. His previous books include Rip-tooth (2010 Tampa Poetry Prize) and Kurosawa’s Dog (2008 FIELD Poetry Prize). An earlier work, Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, received the 1999 Akron Poetry Prize. He lives in Lansing, Michigan.We also offer warm congratulations to the 2014 honorable mentions for standing out amid a competitive field of entries.

• Paul David Adkins, Busting the Beautiful Cage
• Ellen Foos, The Remaining Ingredients
• Matthew McBride & Noah Falck, Vocal Air
• Elizabeth Scanlon, The Brain Is Not the United States
• Jasmine Dreame Wagner, Ask

Born in Manhattan, poet and editor Rachel Wetzsteonreceived degrees
from Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, and Columbia University.
She made her home in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan,
which is the setting for many of her formally assured poems. Influenced by
Charles Baudelaire, Soren Kierkegaard, and Philip Larkin, Wetzsteon infused
her urban and emotional landscapes with a dry wit. As critic Adam Kirsch
noted in his review of Sakura Park, “Wetzsteon’s poems are odes to sharpened
senses, to possibilities held open, and to the city whose own sharp openness
seems like a standing invitation.”Wetzsteon published three collections of poetry: National Poetry Series winner The Other Stars (1994), Home and Away (1998), and Sakura Park (2006), as well as Influential Ghosts (2007), a critical study of poet W.H. Auden. Silver Roses, a posthumous collection of her poetry, was published in 2010.Wetzsteon’s honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry, as well as a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. She taught at the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center in New York and William Paterson University in New Jersey, and at the time of her death had recently joined The New Republic as their poetry editor.