More Than $4,000 Available in Terrain.org 14th Annual Contests in Poetry, Nonfiction, and Fiction

Terrain.org Contest Deadline: September 4, 2023

Terrain.org’s 14th Annual Contests in Poetry, Nonfiction, and Fiction are now open, and prizes this year include $1,000 each for a single grand prize winner plus publication plus a featured online reading in each genre plus $200 for each finalist and publication in all genres. All submissions are considered for publication. $20 per submission.

Our award-winning judges this year are Ross Gay (poetry), Toni Jensen (nonfiction), and Talia Lakshmi Kolluri (fiction).

View our full contest submission guidelines and submit and pay on Submittable.

About Our Judges

Poetry: Ross Gay
Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His first collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller. His new collection of essays, Inciting Joy, was released by Algonquin in October of 2022.

Nonfiction: Toni Jensen
Toni Jensen is the author of Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land, a finalist for the Dayton Peace Prize and a New York Times Editors’ Choice book. An NEA Creative Writing Fellowship recipient in 2020, Jensen’s essays have appeared in Orion, Catapult and Ecotone, among others. She is also the author of a short story collection, From the Hilltop. She teaches at the University of Arkansas and the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Fiction: Talia Lakshmi Kolluri
Talia Lakshmi Kolluri is a mixed South Asian American writer from Northern California. Her debut collection of short stories, What We Fed to the Manticore, is a finalist for the 2023 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the 2023 Pen/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, and was selected as a 2023 ALA RUSA Notable Book. Her short fiction has been published in the minnesota review, Ecotone, Southern Humanities Review, The Common, One Story, Orion, Five Dials, and The Adroit Journal.