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Find details about every creative writing competition—including poetry contests, short story competitions, essay contests, awards for novels, grants for translators, and more—that we’ve published in the Grants & Awards section of Poets & Writers Magazine during the past year. We carefully review the practices and policies of each contest before including it in the Writing Contests database, the most trusted resource for legitimate writing contests available anywhere.

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Writing Prompts

Dealing Creative Nonfiction Prompts Spend some time jotting down notes or a list of things you have had a strong aversion to or found...
Seasonal Sensations Fiction Prompts Autumn arrives with a multitude of textures and sensations: the wool fuzz of a cozy sweater or a...
Mixed Emotions Poetry Prompts “I changed the order of my books on the shelves. / Two days later, the war broke out. / Beware of...

Tools for writers

Literary Magazines 760+
Small Presses 260+
Literary Places 640+
Literary Agents 200+
Grants & Awards 450+
MFA Programs 250+
Writers Retreats 170+
Review Outlets 60+

Barnes & Noble has announced the sale of Sterling Publishing Co. Inc. to Hachette Book Group. Barnes & Noble acquired Sterling in 2003 and the publisher now includes adult imprints Union Square & Co., Puzzelwright Press, Sterling Ethos, and SparkNotes as well as several children’s and gift and stationary imprints. Since 2021, Sterling has been led by Emily Meehan, who oversaw the publisher’s rebranding in January 2022 to Union Square & Co.

Independent bookstores have become a new battleground in China in the ongoing suppression of dissent and free speech but Chinese-language bookstores are thriving abroad, the Associated Press reports. At least a dozen bookstores in China have been shut down in the last few months, and the climate has been “chilling” for China’s publishing industry. In recent years, however, Chinese bookstores have appeared in Japan, France, the Netherlands, and the United States due to the policing of free expression in China and growing Chinese communities abroad.

Unionized bookstore workers held a rally outside the Barnes & Noble flagship store in New York City on November 14 in advance of holiday sales, Publishers Weekly reports. The rally, organized by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, was part of efforts to reach a contract with workers by the end of the year, with an agreement on wages being the final major point to negotiate. Workers from Barnes & Noble, Book Culture, Greenlight, McNally Jackson, and the Strand Book Store were in attendance.

Stephen King, the Guardian , and Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia are among those who have said they will stop posting on X (formerly Twitter), due to concerns about disturbing content on the social media platform, the Guardian reports. King noted a “toxic” atmosphere, and La Vanguardia said the site had become an “echo chamber” for disinformation and conspiracy theories.

Elizabeth Nunez, a Trinidad-born academic and writer whose fiction explored family obligations, the pernicious effects of colonialism, and the immigrant’s nostalgia for home, has died, the New York Times reports. Dr. Nunez was the author of eleven novels, including her most recent title, Now Lila Knows (Akashic Books, 2022), and served as the director of the National Black Writers Conference from 1986 to 2000. Dr. Nunez wrote about her homeland, but also resisted the reduction of her identity. She told the Miami Herald in 2006: “I don’t mind being classified as a Caribbean writer, as long as it’s a subcategory in literary fiction.” Read Dr. Nunez’s essay, “Widening the Path: The Importance of Publishing Black Writers” in the January/February 2017 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Black Garnet Books, the first Black woman-owned brick-and-mortar bookstore in Minnesota has found a new owner five months after Dionne Sims announced it was for sale, Publishers Weekly reports. Sims founded Black Garnet in July 2020, two months after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. The bookstore initially operated as a pop-up to sell works by BIPOC authors but changed to a brick-and-mortar model when Sims received a $100,000 matching grant from the City of St. Paul after raising $113,900 through a GoFundMe campaign. The new owner, who has not yet disclosed her identity, describes herself as a “proud Black queer woman” and leverages creativity in her social justice activism and community organization. She is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota and will introduce herself to the store and its community on Thursday, November 21.

Alexis Wright, a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria, was awarded the $60,000 Melbourne Prize for Literature for her novel Praiseworthy (Giramondo Publishing, 2023), the Guardian reports. The book, told in ten parts, follows more than two hundred years of colonization through the story of a remote Aboriginal town. Wright spent ten years writing Praiseworthy and said the novel is the consequence of “really deep thought and hard work over a long period of time, with many, many false starts and reworking and reworking...until I’m absolutely sure that every page, every part of that book stands up and won’t fall over.” The novel also received the $60,000 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the $60,000 Stella Prize, among other awards.

Georgia Bodnar has launched a boutique literary agency called Noyan Literary in New York , Publishers Weekly reports. The agency is hoping to represent “writers of ambition who are writing books of enduring consequence in both fiction and nonfiction,” Bodnar said. The initial list of authors includes Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde, who won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in 2019, and Debra Kamin, a reporter for the New York Times , among others. Bodnar hopes that running an independent agency will make her “a little bit more accessible to writers…who don’t really know the people to know, who don’t really have the relationships, but who have the talent.”

Katherine Rundell, whose book The Golden Mole : and Other Living Treasure (Faber and Faber, 2022) was published in the United States yesterday by Doubleday under the title Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures , will donate all her royalties from the book’s sale to climate charities in protest of Donald Trump’s re-election, the Guardian reports. “In the scheme of things, it’s very small—but I want my book to be a tiny part of the urgent fight ahead of us,” Rundell said.

Willem Marx writes for Electric Literature about the closure of Banned Books USA and the persistent movement to ban books in the state of Florida. Banned Books USA has been working to counteract censorship efforts in schools and libraries over the past year. In collaboration with Bookshop.org and Electric Literature, Banned Books USA offered Florida residents free access to over nine hundred banned books. Banned Books USA also made targeted gifts to Florida organizations such as Gainesville’s Pride Community Center of North Central Florida and Read Aloud Florida. In total, the organization donated 2,362 books, sponsored fourteen events, and reached thousands of Florida readers. On October 31, 2024, Banned Books USA paused operations after using the funds that were part of a one-time donation from Paul English as well as funds raised with community support.

Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel Orbital (Grove Press, 2024), Publishers Weekly reports. In an interview after the announcement of this year’s longlisted titles, Harvey said, “I wanted to write about our human occupation of low earth orbit for the last quarter of a century—not as sci-fi but as realism. Could I evoke the beauty of that vantage point with the care of a nature writer? Could I write about amazement? Could I pull off a sort of space pastoral? These were the challenges I set myself.”

Lynn Steger Strong writes for the Atlantic about how Lili Anolik’s new book Didion and Babitz , out this month from Scribner, fixates on the alleged rivalry between Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. Strong observes: “Every time Anolik noses her way toward parallels between Didion and Babitz, she veers away, doubling down instead on the split between them.” Strong wonders about the compulsion to pit women against each other, and asks, “What has the world done to us, and particularly to women, to make us so quick to make such blanket statements, to make us think that only a single type of woman writer might have a right to make it out intact?”

Though Salmon Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) has been banned for decades in India, the prohibition is now in doubt because of “some missing paperwork,” the Associated Press reports. Last week, a court in New Delhi concluded proceedings on a petition filed five years ago that challenged the then-government’s ban on the import of the novel. Because authorities could not produce the notification of the ban, the judges declared, “We have no other option except to presume that no such notification exists.” The petitioner’s lawyer, Uddyam Mukherjee, said that the court’s ruling means that at least for now, nothing prohibits someone from importing the book into India.

Louis Menand writes for the New Yorker about Edwin Frank’s book Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel , out this month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and its argument linking twentieth-century authors as disparate as Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, and Chinua Achebe. Menand relays Frank’s view that “the twentieth-century novel is a distinct literary genre,” and deems the book “an ambitious, intelligent, and happily unpretentious effort to map it.” In distinguishing Frank from academic literary critics, Menand writes, “Frank is interested, as literature professors generally are not, in the feel of certain books and writers, and he is adept at capsule characterizations.”

Percival Everett and Samantha Harvey have been given the best odds by Ladbrokes of winning the 2024 Booker Prize, which awards £50,000 (approximately $64,321) to the best English-language novel published each year in the United Kingdom, the Guardian reports. Everett’s novel James (Doubleday) is a reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s point of view. Harvey’s novel Orbital (Grove Press) follows six astronauts circling the earth in twenty-four hours. The winner of the Booker Prize will be announced at a ceremony in London tomorrow.

A children’s book titled Billy and the Epic Escape (Penguin Random House, 2024) penned by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has been retracted after it was condemned for being offensive to Indigenous Australians, the Associated Press reports. In one subplot of the book, an Indigenous girl lives in foster care, and the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Corporation criticized the story and its perpetuation of stereotypes about Indigenous Australians. In a statement, Oliver said, “It was never my intention to misinterpret this deeply painful issue,” and added that he and his publishers “have decided to withdraw the book from sale.”

M. L. Rio writes for Electric Literature about the fantasy of academic life and the dark reality she explores in her fiction. “Academia demands—and rewards—uncompromising devotion and unquestioning acceptance,” she argues. “The cruelest truth of the academy is how hard it is to keep loving something which is slowly killing you.”

A group of Hachette Book Group (HBG) employees has written a letter condemning the new conservative imprint, Basic Liberty, and the appointment of Thomas Spence, the former president and publisher of Regnery, and senior advisor of the Heritage Foundation to lead it, Publishers Weekly reports. Two days after the presidential election, HBG announced that the “new conservative imprint will publish serious works of cultural, social, and political analysis by conservative writers of original thought.” The letter from the protesting employees declares, “We condemn HBG’s decision to put profit before its own people, to let the promise of financial gain overtake morality and conscience, and to platform a person who contributes to the advancement of the Heritage Foundation’s vision for America.” The Heritage Foundation is the publisher of the political initiative known as Project 2025. At least one HBG employee—Alex DiFrancesco—has resigned.

Jennifer Wilson writes for the New Yorker about the fairy tales written by the Brothers Grimm, and how their aim in collecting stories was “to create a cohesive national identity for German speakers.” Wilson explains: “The Grimms’ stories, with their promise of bodying forth an authentically Teutonic spirit, were so sought after during the Nazi years that Allied occupying forces temporarily banned them after the war.” Since then, scholars have emphasized that “their nationalism was rooted in a shared cultural and linguistic heritage, not blood and soil.” Still, as Ann Schmiesing explains in her new book, The Brothers Grimm: A Biography (Yale University Press, 2024), writing about the lives of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm is difficult, and requires a balancing act: It “entails navigating between too naively or too judgmentally presenting the nineteenth-century constructions of Germany and Germanness to which they contributed.”

Dorothy Allison, the lesbian feminist activist, poet, and author of novels like Bastard Out of Carolina (Dutton, 1992) and Cavedweller (Dutton, 1998) has died at seventy-five, Brittany Allen writes on Literary Hub . “Allison wrote about a queer, poor South with dynamism and ferocious love,” Allen writes. “Her books tangoed frankly with historically taboo subjects, like sexual abuse, and spotlit characters under-glimpsed on the shelves of hegemony.”

Literary Events Calendar

Writers' room of boston, readings from the room, words with sarah stern, crosswords: carmen boullosa, jicky schnee, and samantha schnee, readings & workshops.

Poets & Writers Theater

Aaww & kundiman present: emerging writers in conversation.

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Most recent items.

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Brynja Hjálmsdóttir and Rachel Britton, the author and translator of A Woman Looks Over Her Shoulder / Kona lítur við.

The author of Amphibian (Ig Publishing, October 2024) applies lessons in magical realism and metaphor from film to fiction.

The author of the debut poetry collection Good Dress highlights a thoughtful selection of literary journals that helped shepherd her poems into the world, including Underbelly and Hopkins Review .

This past April, NDN Girls Book Club loaded up a big pink truck to distribute over ten thousand free books and care packages throughout the Hopi Reservation and Navajo Nation, improving accessibility to Indigenous literature.

The Center for Book Arts’s new fellowship program supports BIPOC creatives with essential resources to start a small press, planting seeds for a more diverse and equitable vision of publishing.

The author of Amphibian (Ig Publishing, October 2024) contemplates how lessons in screenwriting can be applied to fiction.

Led by best-selling author Lauren Groff, the Lynx Watch helps distribute books banned or challenged in the state of Florida to local readers and works with advocacy organizations to bring awareness to other threatened freedoms.