Final judge is Kristen Arnett.
Submissions for the 2021 New American Fiction Prize are closed. Winner will receive a contract including a $1,500 advance, publication, twenty-five copies, and promotional support.
The contest was open for submissions February 15, 2021 – June 30, 2021.
All full-length fiction manuscripts are welcome, including novels, novellas, collections of stories and/or novellas, novels in verse, linked collections, as well as full-length collections of flash fiction and short-shorts. Full-length fiction manuscripts tend to be at least 100 pages. There is no maximum length.
To submit, please access our convenient online submission manager, which saves paper and helps keep things organized.
We read manuscripts blind, so please exclude identifying information from the manuscript itself. All necessary contact information is included in your Submittable file.
Simultaneous submissions are accepted and encouraged. Please contact us immediately if your manuscript is accepted for publication elsewhere.
Final judge is Kristen Arnett, the NYT bestselling author of Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019), one of The New York Times top books of 2019 and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction. She was awarded Ninth Letter’s Literary Award in Fiction and is a columnist for Literary Hub. Her fiction and essays have appeared at The New York Times, North American Review, The Normal School, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Guernica, Buzzfeed, Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, PBS Newshour, Bennington Review, The Guardian, Salon, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her story collection, Felt in the Jaw (Split Lip Press, 2017) was awarded the 2017 Coil Book Award. She was a Spring 2020 Shearing Fellow at Black Mountain Institute and her next two books (Samson: A Novel and With Foxes: Stories) will be published by Riverhead Books. You can (and should!) find her on Twitter here: @Kristen_Arnett.
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