This contest is now closed. Thank you to everyone who submitted. We hope to announce a longlist in 12 weeks.
Here at Fractured Lit, some of our favorite books to read are brief but dynamic chapbooks filled to the margins with fantastic flash, microfiction, and the occasional longer story. These short books aren’t just for poets anymore. There’s a particular joy to reading several flash fictions by the same author in a strong, cohesive minicollection. Flash may be short, but it’s so dynamic and deep that it often needs to be read in short bursts, and chapbooks are the perfect place to collect these small but mighty stories!
Submissions are open for the Inaugural Fractured Lit Chapbook Prize from February 15 and April 14, 2024.
Because we know writers are inspired by stories of many lengths, entered chapbooks should be around 70% flash and microfiction, but we’d love to allow space for longer stories for the final 30% of each submitted chapbook. Collections should consist of fiction only. No poetry or creative nonfiction at this time, please.
One chapbook will be selected as our winner by our guest judge, W. Todd Kaneko! The winner will receive a $2,000 cash prize, along with manuscript publication and fifty contributor copies. Our chapbooks are distributed internationally via drop-shipping through Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, and other outlets, with 50% royalties. A digital version of the chapbook will be made available to our newsletter subscribers six months to a year after the print publication.
Submissions will be accepted between February 15 and April 14, 2024. Fractured Lit staff will select a shortlist of five to ten chapbooks to pass along to Guest Judge W. Todd Kaneko, who will pick the winner and write the introduction for the manuscript. The winning chapbook will be published in 2025.
All submissions must be single-author prose manuscripts of twenty-five to forty-five pages. Again, we are not interested in poetry or nonfiction for this contest. All manuscripts must be finished: no excerpts, no chapters of a novel, no works-in-progress, or any other incomplete work. Individual pieces may be previously published, but submitted manuscripts should contain some unpublished material. If you have questions or concerns about whether your manuscript would qualify, please email us at contact [at] fracturedlit [dot] com.
"I’m honored and excited to be reading for this contest. Some things I value in flash are concision and compression—there is something so cool about a tightly crafted, efficient piece of prose. I love how flash can tell such big stories with so much less real estate than is found in a longer form story. And chapbooks are awesome in the way they don’t sprawl as much as a book-length work, instead creating a sharper, more focused sequence of pieces. But even so, I try not to go into these kinds of things looking for anything in particular. What I hope is to be surprised by the mix of diverse voices and viewpoints among the submissions; that’s what is really exciting to me, regardless of content or technique or any kind of flash wizardry—I love discovering a voice that is singular among all the other beautiful voices on the contemporary scene. So if I’m being asked what I’m looking for in a submission for this contest, my answer is you, fellow writer. I am looking for your voice and I hope I get to encounter it on the page." ~~Todd Kaneko
Todd Kaneko is the author of This Is How the Bone Sings (Black Lawrence Press 2020) and The Dead Wrestler Elegies, Championship Edition (New Michigan Press 2023). He is coauthor with Amorak Huey of Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic 2018), and Slash / Slash, winner of the 2020 Diode Editions Chapbook Contest. His poems, essays, and stories can be seen in Poetry, Alaskan Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review, The Normal School, Hobart, [PANK], Blackbird, The Rumpus, Song of the Owashtanong: Grand Rapids Poetry in the 21st Century, Bring the Noise: The Best Pop Culture Essays from Barrelhouse Magazine, Best Small Fictions 2017 and 2018, and many other journals and anthologies. Kaneko holds degrees from Arizona State University (MFA, Creative Writing) and the University of Washington (BA, English). A Kundiman fellow, his work has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Originally from Seattle, he is currently an associate professor in the Writing Department at Grand Valley State University and lives with his family in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
guidelines
- Manuscripts should include a table of contents (if necessary) and an acknowledgments page listing any previously published material within the manuscript.
- Submitted manuscripts must be between 25-45 double-spaced pages at 12-point font (not including front/back matter, i.e., title page, dedication, table of contents, etc.). For collections, each piece should begin on a new page.
- Manuscripts must contain some unpublished material. Previously published material cannot have been published in any other chapbook or full-length collection. (Work that was included in a multiauthor anthology is permissible.)
- Self-published chapbooks are previously published and are therefore ineligible.
- We are not currently interested in poetry or creative nonfiction chapbooks.
- Only single-author manuscripts will be considered.
- Simultaneous and multiple submissions are allowed, though each submission requires a separate $25 entry fee.
- Writers from historically marginalized groups may submit for a reduced fee of $15 until we reach a cap of 25 submissions in this category.
- The winner receives $2,000, manuscript publication, and 50 contributor copies.
- The second- and third-place finalists will be acknowledged on our website, alongside any honorable mentions.
- The winning chapbook will receive a full editorial review prior to publication.
- If your work is accepted elsewhere, please withdraw your submission on Submittable, or contact us otherwise to let us know the manuscript is no longer available.
- We do not require anonymous submissions for this contest, though the guest judge will read the shortlist anonymized.
- This chapbook contest is open to any writer regardless of past publications.
- International submissions are allowed, provided the work is written primarily in English. Some code-switching/meshing is warmly welcomed.
- Submissions are accepted through Submittable only.
- The contest’s deadline is 11:59 p.m. PST on April 14, 2024.
- Individual stories or essays within the manuscript may be considered for publication.
- Every submission will receive a response by the end of September 2024. The winners will be announced by the end of October 2024.
- Unless specifically requested, we do not accept AI-generated work.
Some Submittable Hot Tips:
- Please be sure to whitelist/add this address to your contacts so notifications do not get filtered as spam/junk: notifications@email.submittable.com.
- If you realize you sent the wrong version of your piece: It happens. Please DO NOT withdraw the piece and resubmit. Submittable collects a nonrefundable fee each time. Please DO message us from within the submission to request that we open the entry for editing, which will allow you to fix everything from typos in your cover letter to uploading a new draft. The only time we will not allow a change is if the piece is already under review by a reader.
OPTIONAL EDITORIAL FEEDBACK:
We know it can be difficult to find engaging and actionable feedback on chapbook-length submissions, so based on our current editorial feedback system, we’ve created a way for you to request comments and inspiration from our seasoned staff readers especially for the chapbook form. Each critique letter will include recommended focus(es) for revision, as well as highlight the overall strengths of the work.
Our levels of feedback for this contest are:
- a two-page letter for up to 3,000 words @ $69, or
- a three-page letter for up to 12,000 words @ $175.
A significant portion of the editorial letter fee is paid directly to your feedback editor. Should your story win, no feedback will be offered, and your fee will be refunded. For questions about the editorial letter fees, please contact us at contact@fracturedlit.com