Contests
Meridian runs several contests each year, mostly a Short Prose Prize in the late summer/early fall and our annual Editors' Prizes in Poetry and Prose at the end of each year.
Our Short Prose Prize
July 1 to August 15
Anything goes! Send us your microfiction, hybrid bits, lyric essaylets, prose poems, short-short stories ... whatever you call it, we want to read your vibrant, electric prose.
The winner of the Short Prose Prize will receive $250.00 and publication in our print magazine. All submissions, including those selected as finalists, will be considered for publication. In recent years, we have published up to four finalist submissions.
Submit as many times as you like, but please only include one unpublished work of 1,000 words or fewer per submission. All submissions will be read blind by our staff.
For the most up-to-date submission guidelines and eligibility requirements, please visit our Submittable page during the contest's open period.
Our Editors' Prizes in Poetry and Prose
November 1 to January 15
Our Editors’ Prizes in Poetry and Prose are our biggest prizes of the year! The winner in each genre will receive $1,000 and publication. Please note: we consider both fiction and creative nonfiction in our prose prize category.
Our editorial staff wishes to celebrate and champion the work of emerging writers with these prizes. We only accept work submitted by writers who have published two or fewer books, including self-published books but excluding chapbooks. If it’s been for sale and it was not a chapbook, it counts as a publication! However, you may enter our prose contest if your published books were in poetry, and vice versa.
For the most up-to-date submission guidelines and eligibility requirements, please visit our Submittable page during the contest’s open period.