about the contest
We will accept submissions to the Hayden’s Ferry Review Fiction & Poetry Contest between February 1-28, 2027. There will be two prizes of $1000 each and publication in HFR (online and in the fall/winter 2027 print issue) for a poem or a group of poems and a work of fiction. A runner-up in each category will receive $250 and publication. All entries are considered for publication.
The 2027 year fiction judge will be John Manuel Arias, author of Crocodilopolis and Where There Was Fire. and Green Frog. Our poetry judge will be Diannely Antigua, author of Ugly Music and Good Monster.
View a list of our past winners and judges here.
about our 2027 judges
Photo by Beowulf Sheehan
Diannely Antigua is a queer Dominican American poet and educator from Massachusetts. She is the author of the collections Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019), which won a 2020 Whiting Award, and Good Monster (Copper Canyon Press, 2024). She received her MFA at NYU, where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Howard Foundation, CantoMundo, and Community of Writers. From 2022-2024, she served as the 13th Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH. Her poems can be found in Poem-a-Day, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
John Manuel Arias is the author of the National Bestseller Where There Was Fire, a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize. A CantoMundo Fellow and alumnus of the Tin House Summer Workshop, his work has been published in Harper’s Bazaar, The Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, and others. He has lived in Washington, DC, Brooklyn, New York and San José, Costa Rica with his grandmother and four ghosts.
Guidelines & entry fee
Submit 1-3 poems totaling up to 10 pages or a short story or novel excerpt of up to 20 pages with a contest entry fee.
You can choose between a $15 entry fee, which comes with a 1-year digital subscription or a $23 entry fee, which comes with a 1-year print subscription. For international addresses outside of the US, please select a digital subscription. Your 1-year subscription will begin with our spring/summer 2027 issue. Current subscribers will receive a 1-year renewal. Writers may submit multiple entries, but each entry must include its own entry fee.
*If you have an international shipping address and are interested in a 1-year print subscription, we are happy to accommodate this with an additional shipping fee. Please get in touch before submitting and no later than February 20th to discuss details at haydensferryreview (at) gmail (dot) com.
We will accept free submissions during a short free submissions window or until we hit our cap of 50 in each genre. *Please subscribe to our free newsletter by February 3rd. We’ll let our subscribers know via newsletter when our free submissions period will take place.* All will be able to submit for free during the free submission period or until we hit our cap; however, only newsletter subscribers will know in advance exactly when the free submission period will take place. Free submissions do not come with a 1-year subscription.
Judges will pick the winners and runner-ups from a list of finalists chosen by HFR editors. All entries are considered for publication in the fall/winter 2027 print issue. We do not read submissions anonymously.
How to submit
Between Feb 1-28, 2027 submit your work to the appropriate genre at https://hfr.submittable.com/
Submitted work must be original work by the writer and unpublished. If your work is accepted elsewhere for publication, please withdraw your submission. If only a part of your poetry submission has been accepted elsewhere, please leave a note in Submittable.
Eligibility
Close friends, family, or former and current students of the judges should refrain from submitting. We define a "former or current student" as someone who has done a semester-length course with the judge or who the judge has served as a thesis advisor. If you attended a one- or two-week-long workshop or similar with the judge, you are still eligible.
If you were published in one of HFR's print journals or web issues in the past two years, you CAN submit to this contest. (See our "general notes on submission" for specific guidelines for our print and web issues, which may differ from contest guidelines.)
Anyone affiliated with ASU (staff, faculty, and graduate/undergraduate students) is not eligible to submit to this contest and should refrain from submitting to HFR until they have been unaffiliated from ASU for three years.
We do not accept work that was produced wholly or in part by AI.
All individuals are able to submit without regard to sex, race, national origin, religion, disability or any other characteristic protected by law.