THE ANNUAL GULF COAST
PRIZES ARE HERE
Deadline: April 9th, 2016
Awarding $6,000 in prizes to poets, essayists, and fiction writers, this year’s judges are Ayana Mathis (Fiction), David Shields (Nonfiction), and Rick Barot (Poetry)!
The contest awards publication and $1,500 each to the best poem, essay, and short story, as well as $250 to two honorable mentions in each genre. The winners will appear in Gulf Coast 29.1, due out in Fall 2016, and all entries will be considered for paid publication on our website as Online Exclusives. The $23 reading fee includes a one-year subscription to Gulf Coast.
We will accept submissions both via our Submittable page and via postal mail.
Contest Guidelines: Online Submissions
- Submissions accepted via Gulf Coast’s Submittable Page.
- Poetry: Submit up to five poems (ten pages max) in a single .doc, .docx, .rtf, or .pdf file.
- Prose: Submit one story or essay (twenty-five pages max) in a single .doc, .docx, .rtf, or .pdf file.
- Only previously unpublished work will be considered.
- The contest will be judged blindly, so please do not include your cover letter, your name, or any contact information in the uploaded document.
Contest Guidelines: Postal Mail Submissions
- Only previously unpublished work will be considered.
- Please address postal mail entries to:
Gulf Coast
ATTN: Gulf Coast Prize in [Genre]
Department of English
University of Houston
Houston, TX 77204-3013
- The contest will be judged blindly, so your contact information should appear only on your cover letter.
- Please include your $23 reading fee, payable in U.S. dollars to “Gulf Coast.”
ABOUT OUR JUDGES
Ayana Mathis is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a recipient of the 2014-15 New York Public Library’s Cullman Center Fellowship. The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, her first novel, was a New York Times Bestseller, a 2013 New York Times Notable Book of the Year , an NPR Best Books of 2013 and was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as the second selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0. Ayana taught Creative Writing at The Writer’s Foundry MFA Program at St. Joseph’s College, Brooklyn. She is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Rick Barot was born in the Philippines, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and attended Wesleyan University and The Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. He has published two books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002), which received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, and Want (2008), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer in Poetry. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Threepenny Review. His work has been included in many anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, Asian-American Poetry: The Next Generation, Language for a New Century, and The Best American Poetry 2012. Barot is the poetry editor of New England Review. His third collection of poems, Chord, was published by Sarabande in 2015. He lives in Tacoma, Washington and teaches at Pacific Lutheran University. He is also the director of The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at PLU.
David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of twenty books, including Reality Hunger (named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), and Black Planet (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award). Forthcoming are War Is Beautiful(powerHouse, November 2015) and Other People (Knopf, 2017). The recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, Shields has published essays and stories in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, Village Voice, Salon, Slate,
McSweeney’s, and Believer. His work has been translated into
twenty languages.
>via: https://gulfcoastmag.org/contests/gulf-coast-prize/