about the contest
We will accept submissions to the Hayden’s Ferry Review Fiction & Poetry Contest between February 1-28, 2025. There will be two prizes of $1000 each and publication in HFR (online in summer 2025 and in the fall/winter 2025 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.
This year’s fiction judge is Gwen Kirby, author of Shit Cassandra Saw. Our poetry judge is Hieu Minh Nguyen, author of Not Here.
View a list of our past winners and judges here.
about our 2025 judges
Gwen E. Kirby’s debut collection is Shit Cassandra Saw, available from Penguin Books and her stories appear in One Story, Tin House, Guernica, Mississippi Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati. Currently, she is an assistant professor of English at Carleton College, where she teaches creative writing and literature.
Hieu Minh Nguyen is the author of two collections of poetry, This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014) and Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018), which went on to win the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. Some awards and fellowships Hieu has received include: the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a McKnight Writing Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. His work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Atlantic, Poetry London, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Hieu lives in Oakland and is a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University.
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 2025 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 2025 print issue. We do not read submissions anonymously.
How to submit
Between Feb 1-28, 2025 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.
All individuals are able to submit without regard to sex, race, national origin, religion, disability or any other characteristic protected by law.