Award-Winning Poetry and Prose 2026
Spring 2026: Fiction and Nonfiction
GREETINGS FROM THE DESERT
by Emily Bales
Winner of the 2025 Narrative Magazine Winter Story Contest
Entries must be received by March 31
This well-regarded online magazine gives prizes up to $2,500 for short fiction and creative nonfiction up to 15,000 words (all genres compete together). In Bales' retrospective coming-of-age story, the speaker remembers being an aspiring writer in New York City who becomes involved with the father of a student she is tutoring. You will have to create a free account at Narrative to read the full text.
WE LEFT
by Dana Diehl
Winner of the 2024 Hudson Prize
Entries must be received by March 31
Black Lawrence Press gives $1,000 and publication for a collection of poetry or short stories (both genres compete together). Diehl's fabulist fiction collection The Earth Room was the most recently published winner. This story takes place in a Southwestern mountain cabin, where a group of young women calling themselves a "support group for girls with beastly boyfriends" discuss problems that are both fantastical and sadly familiar.
KESH
by Joseph Bathanti
Winner of the 2025 Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award
Entries must be received by April 30
This twice-yearly contest from online journal The Ghost Story gives awards up to $1,500 and publication for a short story with supernatural elements. In Bathanti's atmospheric tale, an Italian-American boy accompanies his mother to visit two mysterious elders who promise to help her conceive a child through folk magic.
