If you’re a new, emerging, or established fiction writer, you’ve got until the end of the month to submit to the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize, which “celebrates imaginative and inventive writing in book-length collections.” The winner receives $2,500 and publication of their collection by Dzanc Books.

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Using only the online submission system, submit a manuscript of at least 40,000 words and a brief synopsis with a $25 entry fee by September 30. Visit the website for complete guidelines.

Dzanc Books is an award-winning nonprofit press; all its contest fees go toward supporting its “commitment to producing quality literary works, providing creative writing instruction in public schools through the Dzanc Writers-in-Residence program, and offering low-cost workshops for aspiring authors.” Its Short Story Collection Prize has recognized writers including Chaya Bhuvaneswar (White Dancing Elephants), Nino Cipri (Homesick), Jen Grow (My Life as a Mermaid), Ethel Rohan (In the Event of Contact), Julie Stewart (Water and Blood), and Anne Valente (By Light We Knew Our Names) for their “innovative, risk-taking, and brilliant fiction.” 

While pregnant and struggling with her mental health and a creative block, author JoAnna Novak sought solace in the work and life of abstract expressionist painter Agnes Martin, who lived with schizophrenia. In Novak’s memoir, Contradiction Days: An Artist on the Verge of Motherhood (Catapult, 2023), she recounts the experience of moving to Taos, New Mexico, where Martin lived for decades, to model her life after the painter’s hermetic existence, shutting herself off from the world for introspection and writing. Whose work do you go to when seeking a way forward? Research the biography of a favorite artist—including their creative habits and routines—and write an essay that meditates on what makes their life and work inspirational. Try to find the personal and aesthetic lineages that connect you together. For more from Novak, read her installment of our Ten Questions series.

As technology continues to play a larger role in society, writers are reflecting on the anxieties and unexpected hopes born out of these changes in their work. Cleo Qian, who is featured in “Literary MagNet” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, explores the fear and loneliness experienced in a technology dependent world in her debut story collection, Let’s Go, Let’s Go, Let’s Go (Tin House, 2023). Her stories center around the inner lives of young Asian and Asian American women using technology to cope: one character escapes into dating simulations after her best friend abandons her while another character looks to a supernatural karaoke machine for redemption. Write a short story in which a technological invention plays a major role. How does this reliance connect to your characters’ vulnerabilities?

“Everybody looks at him playing / the machine hour after hour, / but he hardly raises his gold lashes,” writes Thom Gunn in his poem “Bally Power Play,” which appears in his collection The Passages of Joy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982). In the poem, an unnamed speaker describes the movements of a pinball player in a bar with a sense of close watchfulness and adoration. “He is / the cool source of all that hurry / and desperate activity, in control, / legs apart, braced arms apart, / seeming alive only at the ends,” writes Gunn. This week, write a poem that captures a scene in which your speaker is observing someone closely. Consider, as in Gunn’s poem, how descriptive language can create and match the rhythm of a subject’s movements. For more inspiration, read C. K. Williams’s poem “From My Window.”

Are you an established writer developing a major creative project? Or perhaps an emerging or debut poet seeking to place your chapbook or full-length collection? Read on to learn about two prestigious fellowships and three poetry contests with application deadlines between September 14 and September 19. Both fellowships are open to poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers and offer $50,000 or more with no entry fee. All prizes awarded for poetry collections offer publication and $1,000 or more. We hope you share your work!

Harvard University
Radcliffe Institute Fellowships
Fellowships of $78,000 each, office space at the Radcliffe Institute, and access to the libraries at Harvard University are given annually to poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers to allow them to pursue creative projects. Fellows, who are expected to reside in Boston during the fellowship period, which lasts from September through May, also receive $5,000 to cover project expenses. Poets who have published a full-length collection or at least 20 poems in magazines or anthologies in the last five years and who are in the process of completing a manuscript are eligible. Fiction and creative nonfiction writers who have published one or more books, who have a book-length manuscript under contract for publication, or who have published at least three shorter works are eligible. Writers who are graduate students at the time of application are not eligible. Deadline: September 14. Entry fee: None.

Lightscatter Press
Poetry Prize
A prize of $1,000, 25 author copies, and multimodal publication by Lightscatter Press is given annually for a poetry collection written by an emerging writer. Hybrid works and multilingual texts that combine English with another language are eligible. Eduardo C. Corral will judge. Deadline: September 15. Entry fee: $30.

Finishing Line Press
New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition  
A prize of $1,500 and publication by Finishing Line Press is given annually for a poetry chapbook by a writer who identifies as a woman and has not yet published a full-length collection. English translations of poems originally written in another language are accepted. Leah Huete de Maines will judge. Deadline: September 15. Entry fee: $20.

University of Wisconsin Press
Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes
Two prizes of $1,500 each and publication by University of Wisconsin Press are given annually for poetry collections. Additional finalists will be published in the press’s Wisconsin Poetry series. Deadline: September 15. Entry fee: $28.

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
Writing Fellowships
Fellowships of approximately $50,000 each are awarded annually to poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers on the basis of “exceptional creative ability.” Citizens and permanent residents of the United States and Canada with a “significant and appropriate record” of publication are eligible. Deadline: September 19. Entry fee: None.

Visit the contest websites for complete guidelines, and check out the Grants & Awards database and Submission Calendar for more contests in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and translation.

In 1894, President Grover Cleveland signed a law declaring the first Monday of September as a workers holiday after labor unions pushed for recognition of both the contributions and mistreatment of American workers. Some of the laws that protect workers today—the forty-hour workweek, minimum wage, and health coverage—began with celebrating Labor Day. Workplace struggles can inspire great writing, whether it be about feeling stuck in a dead-end job, as in Raven Leilani’s novel Luster (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), or real-life experiences, as in Philip Levine’s collection What Work Is (Knopf, 1991), in which the poems offer a portrait of assembly line workers. Write a short story centered around a protagonist’s relationship with a job. Try to tease out the spiritual and physical repercussions of our society’s relationship with work in your fiction.