Best Emerging Writers 2026 — Judged by Ramona Ausubel | $7,000 Awarded!

Best Emerging Writers 2026

Fifteen years ago, The Masters Review opened with a call for stories with a sense of urgency and authenticity, with a dare to “be creative, bend genres, and be yourself.” From this call emerged our very first anthology, and for every year since, these criteria have been our guiding principles. This April, we’re opening a call for submissions for our anthology for the fifteenth time. Best Emerging Writers 2026 will showcase a collection of prose from ten emerging writers who are bold and brave, who tell stories only they can tell, stories that must be told now. 

Ramona Ausubel, author of The Last Animal, will select this year’s best emerging writers! Each of our ten winners will receive a $700 award and a print copy of the book.

“I am so excited to read your dearest and truest work. I love stories of all kinds—ultra realistic, ultra-wild, quiet, loud, lush, sparse. What I want is to read work that feels bright with your own obsessions, your own way of seeing. I love a sentence that makes me want to stop and re-read. Bring me your particularity, your exact images, your surprises, and your care—it will be my great good luck to be on the other side.” 

—Guest Judge Ramona Ausubel

Our anthology has been at the heart of our mission to provide a platform for emerging writers since day one, and we’re excited to share these stories and essays both in our printed book and on our website, where they will be highlighted for a full year. The book will be available for purchase at Bookshop.org and other online distributors. Submissions will open April 6 and close June 7, 2026. As always, we don’t have any preferences topically or in terms of style. We’re simply looking for the best.

Guidelines:

• Submissions of fiction or creative nonfiction must be under 8,000 words.
• Submitted work must be previously unpublished, which includes publication on personal blogs, social media accounts, and other websites. Previously published work will be automatically disqualified.
• The entry fee per submission is $20.
• Simultaneous submissions and multiple submissions are allowed, though each submission requires a $20 entry fee.
• Writers from historically marginalized or underrepresented groups are invited to submit for free until we reach fifty submissions in this category. NOTE: Submission cap has been met.
• 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, though the guest judge will review 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 June 7, 2026.
• All entries are also considered for publication in New Voices.
• Every submission will receive a response by the end of September 2026. The winners will be announced in October 2026.
• Friends, family, and close associates of the guest judge are ineligible for this award.
• Writers whose work appears in previous editions of our anthology are ineligible for this award.

Ten winners will receive:

• a $700 award;
• publication in our internationally distributed anthology and on our website;
• a contributor’s copy;
• and exposure to over fifty literary agencies as part of our exclusive mailing. We send our anthology to editors, writers, and literary institutions across the country.

Raffle Opportunity

For an additional $5, sign up to participate in our raffle. One lucky winner will receive editorial feedback on a story or essay of their choice. Other prizes include a copy of JR Fenn’s Tiny Vessels, back issues of The Masters Review’s anthologies, and a voucher for a free submission to any future TMR contest. Ten winners will be announced in June after submissions close.

About the Judge

Ramona Ausubel is the national bestselling author of five books of fiction, most recently The Last Animal which won the National Book Foundation Science + Literature Prize. Unstuck: 101 doorways leading from the blank page to the last page, a writer’s guide, will be published by Tin House Zando in April 2026. She is the recipient of the PEN/USA Fiction Award, the Cabell First Novelist Award and has been a finalist for both the California and Colorado Book Awards and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review daily, One Story, Tin House, The Oxford American, Ploughshares and elsewhere. She is a professor at Colorado State University and lives in Boulder with her family. 

Editorial Letter Option

If you’re interested in getting feedback on your writing, utilize our editorial letter add-on option. Our response to your submission will be accompanied by a one- to two-page letter from an experienced guest editor, who will offer observations on the strengths of the piece as well as opportunities for revision. Your editor may also offer further submission and reading suggestions, or other comments on craft. A significant portion of the additional fee is paid directly to your feedback editor. See a sample editorial letter.