2025-2026 Winter Short Story Award for New Writers — Judged by Jim Shepard | $3,000 Prize (Free for Marginalized or Historically Underrepresented Writers)

Ends on

2025-2026 Winter Short Story Award for New Writers

Note: This submission category is for marginalized or historically underrepresented writers ONLY.

When the temperature drops, our excitement peaks: It’s time for the Winter Short Story Award for New Writers! Since 2016, our Short Story Award has connected emerging writers with some of the industry’s top literary agents. Past winners include Nana Nkweti, Nick Fuller Googins, Sanjena Sathian, and more, several of whom earned representation from one of our partnered agents as a result of this contest. This award is your chance to take the next step in your writing career.

We’re looking for original, stellar stories that only you can tell, either fiction or narrative nonfiction, up to 6,000 words. Jim Shepard will serve as this year’s guest judge, selecting the top three finalists from a shortlist chosen by our editorial team. This year’s contest runs from December 1, 2025, to February 1, 2026, and is open to any writer who has not published a novel or memoir with a major press. The first-place winner will receive a $3,000 grand prize, while the second- and third-place winners will receive $300 and $200 respectively. We publish all winning pieces online.

All winners will also receive agency review from our six partnered agencies. Participating agents include Nat Sobel from Sobel Weber, Victoria Cappello from The Bent Agency, Andrea Morrison from Writers House, Sarah Fuentes from United Talent Agency, Heather Schroder from Compass Talent,and Marin Takikawa from The Friedrich Agency.

What am I looking for? A story with sufficient and urgent emotional and thematic stakes. A story that continually enlarges our understanding of its main situation and characters. A story that’s alert to the possibilities of language, as well as the way the personal is political. A story that reminds us why we love to hear stories.

—Jim Shepard

Submission Guidelines

The first-place winner receives $3,000, online publication, and agency review.
The second- and third-place finalists receive cash prizes ($300/$200), online publication, and agency review.
Submissions of fiction or creative nonfiction must be under 6,000 words.
Submitted work must be previously unpublished. This includes personal blogs, social media accounts, and other websites. Previously published work will be automatically disqualified.
If your submission is accepted elsewhere, please withdraw your submission on Submittable, or contact us otherwise to let us know the piece is no longer available.
We do not require anonymous submissions for this contest, but the guest judge will read the shortlist anonymously.
This contest is for emerging writers only. Writers with single-author book-length work published or under contract with a major press are ineligible. We are interested in providing a platform to new writers; authors with books published by indie presses are welcome to submit unpublished work, as are self-published authors.
International submissions are allowed, provided the work is written primarily in English.
No translations, please.
All submissions must be double-spaced with one-inch page margins and use 12pt Times New Roman or Garamond font.
The contest’s deadline is 11:59pm PDT on February 1, 2026.
All entries are also considered for publication in New Voices.
Every submission will receive a response by the end of May 2026. The winners will be announced by the end of June 2026.
AI-generated or -assisted submissions will be automatically disqualified.
Friends, family, and associates of the guest judge are not eligible for this award. Consider submitting to the summer contest instead!

About the Judge

Jim Shepard has written eight novels, including The Book of Aron, which won the Sophie Brody Medal for Jewish Literature, the PEN/New England Award for Fiction, The Ribalow Prize for Fiction, and the Clark Fiction Prize, as well as six story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, a finalist for the National Book Award and Story Prize winner, and the forthcoming The Queen of Bad Influences. Eight of his stories have been chosen for the Best American Short Stories, two for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and three for Pushcart Prizes. He’s been a recipient of the Rea Award for the Short Story, the ALEX Award for Fiction, the Library of Congress/Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. For seven years he was a columnist on film for the magazine The Believer, and his film essays have been collected in The Tunnel at the End of the Light. He’s also written screenplays for two films made from his fiction, And Then I Go (2017) and The World to Come (2020). He lives in Williamstown with his wife, Karen Shepard, and two beagles, and from 1983 to 2024 taught film and creative writing at Williams College.

2025-2026 Winter Short Story Award for New Writers — Judged by Jim Shepard | $3,000 Prize (Free for Marginalized or Historically Underrepresented Writers)