2010 Contests

World's Best Short Short Story Contest
Send up to three short-short stories per submission, accompanied by a $15 reading fee. Each short-short story should be no more than 500 words. Include your name, contact information (email address preferred), and the title of each of your short-short stories in a very brief cover letter. Do not include personal identification information on the short-shorts themselves. Robert Olen Butler will judge. One winner will be chosen and awarded $500. The winner and nine finalists will be published in spring/summer 2011. Label envelope: WBSSSC.

The Southeast Review Poetry Contest
Send up to three poems, no more than 10 pages total, accompanied by a $15 reading fee. Include no more than one poem per page. Include your name, contact information (email address preferred), and the title of each of your poems in a very brief cover letter. Do not include personal identification information on the poems themselves. Barbara Hamby will judge. One winner will be chosen and awarded $500. The winning poem and nine finalists will be published in spring/summer 2011. Label envelope: SER Poetry Contest.

The Southeast Review Narrative Nonfiction Contest
Send one piece of nonfiction, no more than 6,000 words total, accompanied by a $15 reading fee. Include your name, contact information (email address preferred), and the title of your submission in a very brief cover letter. Do not include personal identification information on the submission itself. Julianna Baggott will judge. One winner will be chosen and awarded $500 (double the prize from last year!). The winning essay and two finalists will be published in spring/summer 2011. Label envelope: SER Nonfiction Contest.

General Contest Guidelines

All submissions must be typed and sent via snail mail. Make checks or money orders out to: The Southeast Review. Postmark deadline: April 1, 2010.

Friends and current or former students of the judge and those who have been affiliated with Florida State University within the last five years are ineligible.

Please do not send an SASE. Winners will be announced on the website in July. All contestants will receive the issue in which the winning submissions appear.

Send all submissions to:
The Southeast Review
Department of English
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306

About Our Judges

Robert Olen Butler is the author of ten novels and four collections of short stories. In addition to a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 and two National Magazine Awards, he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and an NEA grant, as well as the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award from the American of Arts and Letters. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Paris Review, The Sewanee Review, Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South, and many other journals. He holds a distinguished Frances Eppes Professorship at Florida State University.

Barbara Hamby's fourth book of poems, All-Night Lingo Tango (2009), was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her third book of poems, Babel, was chosen by Stephen Dunn to win the 2003 Associated Writing Programs Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and was also published by Pittsburgh. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Best American Poetry 2000 and 2009, and elsewhere. She and her husband, David Kirby, guest-edited an issue of TriQuarterly—128: The UltraTalk Issue. They are also editing an anthology of poetry, Seriously Funny, which will be published by the University of Georgia Press in 2010. She is Writer-in-Residence in the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University. In Spring 2009 she was a visiting professor at the University of Houston. 

Julianna Baggott is the author of sixteen books, published and forthcoming, including national bestseller Girl Talk and Which Brings Me to You (co-written with Steve Almond); three books of poems, and seven novels for young readers, most notably The Anybodies trilogy, under the pen name N.E. Bode. Twenty-two foreign editions of her novels have been published or are forthcoming overseas. Her work has appeared in dozens of publications, including Best American Poetry 2000, 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Everyday (ed. Billy Collins), The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry, Glamour, Ms. Magazine, and read on NPR’s Talk of the Nation.

You can read the winners and finalists from our 2010 contests, listed below, in our winter/spring issue, Volume 29.1, set to arrive in January 2011.

World’s Best Short Short Story Contest
judged by Robert Olen Butler

Winner:
*Betsy Denson, “Rest” and “Motion”

Finalists:
Mical Darley, “Bruce Ismay Commentates the Winter Olympics, St. Mortiz, 1928”
Betsy Denson, "Impact"
Jen Fawkes, "Dear Ahab"
M.J. Fievre, "On the Balcony"
Amina Gautier, "Prone"
Kim Henderson, "The Carousel"
Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, "A Clean-Shaven Man"
Rebecca J. Schmuck, "There Are No Philosophers Anymore"

SER Poetry Contest
judged by Barbara Hamby

Winner:
Rebecca Hoogs, “Miss Scarlet”

Finalists:
Chuck Carlise, “Street Ghazal”
Alicia Case, “Inversion”
Chad Faries, “Fracture: Of Flying”
Dion Farquhar, “Legacy”
Gabor Gyukics, “Forge or Subdue”
Rebecca Lauren, “Eschatology”
Ellen LaFlèche, “Midwife Man”
Jeanne Wagner, “Kentucky is the Saddest State”
Diana Woodcock, “Counting Desert Birds”

SER Narrative Nonfiction Contest
judged by Julianna Baggott

Winner:
Deborah Thompson, “See Monkey Dance, Make Good Photo”

Finalists:
Lisa K. Buchanan, “Sixty-Seven Reasons to Answer the Door on Saturday at 6:03 a.m.”
Caitlin Leffel, “Hope for Dead Letters”


* In a very rare instance, Robert Olen Butler selected two stories as the winners of our 2010 World’s Best Short Short Story Contest, along with eight finalists. As both of the winning pieces were authored by one person, a single author still received the entire $500 prize. As it happened, the third piece submitted by that author was also named a finalist, so please join us in wishing Betsy Denson an extra congratulations!