The 2016 Barthelme Prize for Short Prose

From our friends at Gulf Coast:

Gulf Coast is now accepting entries for the 2016 Barthelme Prize for Short Prose. The contest is open to pieces of prose poetry, flash fiction, and micro-essays of 500 words or fewer. Established in 2008, the contest awards its winner $1,000 and publication in the journal. Two honorable mentions receive $250 and will also appear in issue 29.2, due out in April 2017. All entries will be considered for paid publication on our website as online exclusives.

Jim Shepard will judge this year’s contest. Shepard has written seven novels, including The Book of Aron, published in 2015, which won the Sophie Brody Medal for Excellence in Jewish Literature and the PEN/New England Award for Fiction, and four story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, a finalist for the National Book Award and Story Prize winner.  His previous novel, Project X, won the Library of Congress/Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction as well as the ALEX Award from the American Library Association.  His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope: All-Story, Playboy, and Electric Literature, he’s won a Guggenheim Fellowship, five of his stories have been chosen for the Best American Short Stories, two for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and one for a Pushcart Prize.   He teaches creative writing and film at Williams College.

Entries are due August 31, 2016. The $18 entry fee includes a year-long subscription to Gulf Coast.

We will accept submissions both via our online submissions manager and via postal mail.  Visit https://gulfcoastmag.org/contests/barthelme-prize/ for more information,.