Writing contest: 5th Wordstock Short Fiction Competition

Wordstock, an annual writing festival held in Portland, Oregon, is accepting submissions for its 5th Wordstock Short Fiction Competition. This national contest is a blind competition. The winner of the competition receives a first prize of $1,000 and publication in the October 2011 issue of Portland Monthly magazine. All 10 finalists’ stories will be published in the Wordstock Ten, an anthology that will be available at the festival, at Portland-area bookstores, and online through the Wordstock website. Every writer who enters the competition will receive a copy of the anthology.

The final judge for this year’s competition is novelist Aimee Bender.

Aimee Bender

Bender is the author of four books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) which was a NY Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) which was an L.A. Times pick of the year, Willful Creatures (2005) which was nominated by The Believer as one of the best books of the year, and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010) which recently won the SCIBA award for best fiction, and an Alex Award. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper’s, Tin House, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, and many more places, as well as heard on PRI’s This American Life and Selected Shorts. Her fiction has been translated into sixteen languages. She lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing at USC.

The fee to enter the contest is $20. This year, for the first time, submissions can only be made online. Any proceeds from the competition go to support Wordstock’s education programs for teachers and students. The deadline for entering the 2011 competition is July 15.

Complete submission guidelines are available at http://wordstockfestival.com/get-involved/short-fiction-competition