About the Contest
Update: The deadline for HFR’s poetry and fiction contest has been EXTENDED to March 7, 2024. This year’s poetry judge is Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Ghost Of and Root Fractures, forthcoming 1/30/24 from Scribner. This year’s fiction judge is Venita Blackburn, author of How to Wrestle a Girl and Dead in Long Beach, California, forthcoming 1/23/24 from Macmillan.
There will be two prizes of $1,500 each and publication in Hayden’s Ferry Review (online in summer 2024 and in the fall/winter 2024 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.
About our judges
Poetry Judge Diana Khoi Nguyen
A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Root Fractures (2024) and Ghost Of (2018), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her video work has been exhibited at the Miller ICA. Nguyen is a MacDowell and Kundiman fellow, and a member of the Vietnamese artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s). She's received an NEA fellowship and awards from the 92Y "Discovery" Poetry and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery contests. She teaches in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Fiction Judge Venita Blackburn
Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in the New Yorker, NY Times, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Story Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Paris Review, and others. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship in 2014 and several Pushcart prize nominations. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize for fiction, which resulted in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017. In 2018 she earned a place as a finalist for the PEN/Bingham award for debut fiction, finalist for the NYPL Young Lions award and was recipient of the PEN America Los Angeles literary prize in fiction. Blackburn’s second collection of stories is How to Wrestle a Girl, 2021, finalist for a Lambda Literary Prize and was a NYTimes editor’s choice. Her debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, will be published January of 2024 and is about the mania of grief, all of human history and a lesbian assassin at the end of the world. She is the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities of color: livewriteworkshop.com. Her home town is Compton, California, and she is an Associate Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.
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 $20 entry fee, which includes a 1-year print subscription (US addresses) or a digital subscription (international addresses)* with a waived shipping fee. Your 1-year subscription will begin with our spring/summer 2024 issue 74. Current subscribers will receive a 1-year renewal. Writers may submit multiple entries, but each entry must include its own $20 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 25th 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 7th. 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 2024 print issue. Our team has decided not to read submissions anonymously. These articles helped inform our decision: “The Politics of Gatekeeping: On Reconsidering the Ethics of Blind Submissions” in Poets & Writers; “The Politics of “Blind Submissions” Policies” in Apogee; and “How Can Literary Magazines Counter Their Biases?” in Electric Lit.
How to submit
Between Feb 1-29, 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.