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Electric Literature

Emerging Writers Contest

For 17 years, Electric Literature has remained dedicated to uplifting emerging writers. Now, we’re furthering that mission by launching our very first Emerging Writers Contest, with categories in fiction and poetry!

One winner in each genre will receive $1,000, publication in either Recommended Reading (fiction) or The Commuter (poetry), and two weeks at the Writing Downtown residency program in Downtown Las Vegas, started by Plympton and the Writer’s Block bookstore. Second-place winners will receive $250, and third-place winners will receive $100. All fiction finalists will receive a review with feedback from a literary agent.

Submissions will open on July 1, 2026 via Submittable, and the entry fee is $20 per submission.

See below for information on judges, eligibility, and submission guidelines.

2026 Contest Judges

Our 2026 contest judges are Alexander Chee for fiction and Danez Smith for poetry.

Alexander Chee, author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, is an award-winning novelist and essayist whose honors include a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Danez Smith, author of Don’t Call Us Dead and Homie, is an award-winning poet and performer widely recognized as one of the leading voices in contemporary poetry.

Eligibility

  • This contest is for emerging writers only. We define an emerging writer as anyone who has not published a full-length book with a major publisher. Authors who have published chapbooks, indie or university press books with a print run of under 500, or who have self-published are all eligible, provided the work submitted to the contest is original and unpublished.
  • The contest is open to both U.S. and international writers.
  • Current or past Electric Literature staff members, interns, or readers in any genre are not eligible to submit.
  • Friends, family, and close associates of the guest judges are not eligible to submit to that judge’s contest category.

If you have any questions about your eligibility, please email us at editors@electricliterature.com.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions will open from July 1, 2026 through 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time on July 15, 2026 or until we reach our submission caps: 1,000 for fiction and 600 for poetry. All submissions will be considered for publication.

  • Fiction writers may submit one story between 2,000 and 10,000 words. Poets may submit up to three poems, totaling no more than 1,500 words.
  • Work will be judged anonymously. Please remove all identifying information from your manuscript.
  • All work must be original and unpublished. Work previously published in any form (including self-published) cannot be considered.
  • Translations are accepted, provided the work has not previously been published in the English language and that the translator has obtained proper permissions.
  • Multiple submissions are allowed. Each entry must be sent as a new submission, and an entry fee must be paid for each.
  • Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please let us know immediately if a submission is accepted elsewhere.
  • Files should be submitted as .doc or .docx.
  • Work that was created using generative AI is not permitted, with rare exception made for pieces that engage with the tool in an intentional, artistic, and transparent manner (e.g., “A conversation between Ethan Gilsdorf and ChatGPT”). Any use of AI in the creation of a piece must be disclosed in your submission.

Prizes

  • Winners in each category will receive $1,000, publication in Recommended Reading (fiction) or The Commuter (poetry), and two weeks at the Writing Downtown residency program in Downtown Las Vegas, started by Plympton and the Writer’s Block bookstore.
  • Second-place winners in each category will receive $250, and third-place winners will receive $100.
  • All fiction finalists will receive a review with feedback from either literary agent Sarah Bowlin of Aevitas Creative Management or Danielle Bukowski of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.
  • Winners will be announced in early 2027.

Entry Fee

There is a $20 entry fee for each submission. All contest fees go toward supporting Electric Literature, a 501(c)3 nonprofit.

Thank you to our wonderful sponsors!

Thank you to our volunteer contest readers! You can read more about each of them below.

Poetry Readers

Hannah Bagley is a poet and writer from the North Georgia Mountains. She is a Writing MFA candidate at Sarah Lawrence College and an alumna of the University of North Georgia. Her poems have been published in Thee Golden Egg, Appalachia Bare, Jimson Weed, and elsewhere.

Rebecca Clay is a nurse and writer living in Asheville, North Carolina. She is an MFA candidate at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and her work can be found in the Great Smokies Review, Split Rock Review, and Glint Literary Journal, among other places.

August Della Donna is a queer artist and poet originally from Connecticut. Their work focuses primarily on the exploration of how trauma is stored in the body, and reflection of memory in the self. Della Donna has recently been published in YarnBomb Zine and Local Gems Press’ 2025 Connecticut Bards Anthology. Currently they are an MFA candidate at Sarah Lawrence College for Poetry.

Justin Howerton is a writer from Memphis, Tennessee. Poetry is his first love, but lately he’s been trying to wrangle prose. His first feature-length script, Clearing the Trace, was a finalist in the 2024 Del Shores Foundation Writers Search. Recent poems can be found in Foglifter and Bicoastal Review. He received his MFA from Louisiana State University. He’s at work on a novel.

Olivia Jacobson is a PhD candidate at Florida State University. She received her MFA in poetry from Syracuse University. Her chapbook, On Junkyards, won the Etchings Press Book Prize for Poetry (October 2025). Winner of the Charles Simic Poetry Prize (2025), her work appears or is forthcoming in the Florida Review, Hole in the Head, and Moon City Review. Find her on her website.

Carolina Murriel is an award-winning journalist, writer, and editor. Before co-founding Pizza Shark, a podcast studio working toward radical inclusivity in media, she was an immigration and arts reporter for the BBC and Miami’s NPR affiliate. Her creative nonfiction won Prairie Schooner’s Jane Geske Award, and she is a Tin House and Macondo Writing Workshop scholar. Her work is in NPR, California Sunday Magazine, the Miami Herald, the Undocupoets anthology Here to Stay, and elsewhere.

Harper Obstfeld is a writer from California currently pursuing her MFA in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. She works as an editorial intern for The Alexander Review and as an after-school elementary teacher. Her work has been published in Cetera Magazine and The Redlands Review.

Lauryn Payne is a poet and aspiring puzzle enthusiast from Elk Grove, California. She holds a BA from Chapman University in Sociology and an MFA in English (Poetry) from the University of California, Irvine. She will be attending the University of Colorado, Boulder, in the fall to pursue her PhD in Ethnic Studies, where her research will focus on critical pedagogy, Black feminist literary tradition, and the formal poetics of deviation and resistance.

Stephen Thomas Roberts is a retired attorney currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Sarah Lawrence College, where he served as a Poetry Editor for the most recent issue of the graduate literary magazine Lumina. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including Pinch, EPOCH, and SLANT. He resides in the Mid-Hudson Valley in New York.

Mayzie Sattler is a poet from upstate New York. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, where she served as Poetry Editor for Lumina Journal and Co-Director of the Sarah Lawrence College Poetry Festival. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Mid-Atlantic Review, Coffin Bell Journal, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Dodging The Rain, and elsewhere. She was long-listed for the ONLY POEMS 2025 Poet of the Year. Mayzie lives in Kingston, NY.

Sara Son is a writer from Queens. Her work appears in The Sun, The Margins, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from UC Irvine, and is an incoming PhD student at UCLA. She lives in Southern California.

Fiction Readers

Diana Andrade is a Los Angeles-based bilingual writer and editor from Bogotá, Colombia. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in the Rio Grande Review, Iowa Literaria, Casapaís, and several other journals and anthologies across Latin America and the United States. She holds a PhD in History from Princeton University.

Jessika Bouvier is a queer Cajun writer. She is currently writing a novel about white people in the wilderness. She also co-founded Chatterbox!, a journal for long-form fiction.

Shandela Contreras is a Los Angeles-based poet, writer, and teaching artist. She is the author of Cricket in the Slit of a Tummy (Bottlecap Press, 2025) and Every Beautiful Pen Bleeds Through (2024). She holds an MA in Literary Editing and Publishing from the University of Southern California and has served as a California and Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate Ambassador.

Annie Delmedico is a writer from North Carolina. Her writing has appeared in Bennington Review, ZYZZYVA Online, Action Spectacle, and elsewhere. She currently lives in San Francisco.

Celine Fitzpatrick is a Chicago-based writer. She earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2023.

Ellen Garard is a writer from London. Her work has been shortlisted for the Robert J. DeMott short prose contest, appearing in Quarter After Eight journal. She recently placed second in SmokeLong Quarterly’s annual flash fiction competition.

Grace Gaynor is a writer from Louisville, Kentucky. She is an assistant poetry editor at Noemi Press and reads for Bicoastal Review and Recommended Reading. She studied English and GWS at Hollins University and earned an MFA in creative writing from Virginia Tech.

Inés M Gómez has experience writing, reading and editing for various literary journals and publications. She is especially interested in experimental and character-driven work.

Joseph Hendricks is an attorney, lover of fiction, and aspiring writer. He lives in New York with his wife and their one-year-old son.

Peter Kahnert is a writer and attorney living in Cleveland, Ohio. He studied English at the Ohio State University and law at Cornell University, where he served as the managing editor of the Cornell Law Review. When not writing or litigating, Peter is likely drinking a Tom Collins and listening to Lorde with his wife and cats. His fiction has previously appeared in Meridian.

Wasima Khan is a Pakistani-Dutch writer and poet whose honors include the Willow Springs Surrealist Poetry Prize and the Blue Frog Flash Fiction Prize. You can find her work in About Place Journal, Fourteen Hills, Redivider, phoebe, and elsewhere.

Dr. Esther Kim is a writer, model, actor, stylist, and designer. Her background in healthcare and technical writing hasn’t been supplanted by creative pursuits so much as provided invaluable foundational support. Dr. Kim is working on her debut novel and resides in Thailand.

Michele Lombardo is a fiction writer, Co-Founder of the monthly writing series Write Now Lancaster, and a graduate of UCR Palm Desert’s MFA Program. Her work has appeared in several literary journals, including New Ohio Review, Sou’wester, Literary Orphans, DASH Literary Journal, and others, and her story “People with Problems” was displayed as part of a Public Art Project at Franklin & Marshall College’s Phillips Museum of Art.

Zahra Mayeesha is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of British Columbia, where they are at work on a novella. Their work has appeared in both print and online publications.

Erin Saladin is a writer and freelancer living in Western Massachusetts. She holds an MA in English, and her research on gothic literature often works its way into her fiction. As a volunteer reader for Electric Literature, she has been delighted and inspired to see the boundless ways writers are still making narrative new.

MB Valente is a writer and translator based in Marseille, France. Her original fiction has appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Pithead Chapel, and JAKE, among other places, and she is the translator of more than 30 graphic novels and comic books from French and Chinese.

Anouk Wijeratne is a writer and designer based in Los Angeles. She enjoys dark, mercurial, and sociopolitical stories about the contemporary landscape, particularly those with a tender twist.

Sarah Yahm is a writer, educator, and oral historian living in Vermont. Her debut novel, Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation, was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness award, and winner of the Eric Hoffer award for General Fiction.