CutBank is pleased to announce the 2016 contests for the Montana Prize in Fiction, Montana Prize in Nonfiction, and the Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry. We are honored and excited to have three extremely talented guest judges this year: Claire Vaye Watkins for Fiction, Amanda Fortini for Nonfiction, and Oliver de la Paz for Poetry.
The Montana Prize in Fiction, the Montana Prize in Nonfiction, and the Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry seek to highlight work that showcases authentic voice, boldness of form, and a rejection of functional fixedness. A winner from each genre, chosen by our guest judges, will be featured in CutBank 85 and receive $500. All submissions will be considered for print publication. We look forward to reading your work!
Submissions are accepted November 9 through January 15. Submissions are accepted through our online submission manager only. The $20 contest entry fee includes a one-year subscription to CutBank and covers the reading of a single submission in a single genre. For fiction and nonfiction, please send only a single work of no greater than 35 pages. For poetry, submit up to five poems. Please submit only once per genre, though writers are permitted to submit in multiple genres. Include a short cover letter that mentions your address (where your subscription will be sent), phone number, and email address, as well as the title of your work. Please include the author's name on the manuscript—names will be removed from the pool of submissions that goes before our contest judges. Current subscribers must submit the same $20 fee, and their CutBank subscriptions will be extended by one year. Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please withdraw your submission via Submittable immediately should it be accepted elsewhere. We are unable to offer refunds.
Entrants will be notified of their submission status no later than March 15, 2016. One winner in each genre, as chosen by our guest judges, will receive a $500 award and publication in CutBank 85, our summer 2016 issue. Winners will be required to complete a W-9 form to receive payment. All manuscripts are considered for publication in CutBank. All rights to selected manuscripts revert to the author upon publication. The author grants their permission to have their work electronically archived as part of CutBank 85 in EBSCO International's subscription-based research database. Current University of Montana students and faculty and former CutBank staff are not eligible for the awards.
About our amazing judges:
Claire Vaye Watkins' stories and essays have appeared in Granta, One Story, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Best of the West 2011, New Stories from the Southwest 2013, the New York Times and elsewhere. A recipient of fellowships from the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, Claire was also one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35.” Her collection of short stories, Battleborn, won the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. Her novel, Gold Fame Citrus, is out now from Riverhead Books. A Guggenheim Fellow, Claire is on the faculty of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. She is also the co-director, with Derek Palacio, of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada.
Amanda Fortini has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, the New Republic, New York Magazine, Slate and Salon, among other publications. She is a contributing editor at Elle Magazine, where she writes about feminism, culture, and women's issues. Her essays have been widely anthologized, including in Best American Political Writing and Best of Slate, and she was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award. Last Fall, she was a William Kittredge Visiting Professor at the University of Montana. She currently divides her time between Livingston, Montana and Las Vegas, Nevada.
Oliver de la Paz is the author of four collections of poetry, Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, and the forthcoming Post Subject: A Fable. He is also the co-editor of A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. A co-chair for the advisory board of Kundiman.org, he teaches in the MFA program at Western Washington University and in the Low-Residency MFA program at PLU.