Literary Awards Competition is Now Open

Festival Staff / April 17, 2019

The eighth annual Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards is now accepting fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for the 2020 competitions. Deadline: October 31, 2019.

First-place winners in each category will receive $1,000. Second-place winners receive $500, and third-place winners $250. All winners will be awarded scholarships to the 2020 Tucson Festival of Books Masters Workshop in March, on the University of Arizona campus, following the Tucson Festival of Books (tucsonfestivalofbooks.org).

The top 50 entrants will be invited to attend the Masters Workshop ($300), the faculty for which is drawn from the Festival's presenters. Past faculty include Ann Hood, Marilyn Chin, Andre Dubus III, and Luis Alberto Urrea.

For information on the literary awards and the workshop, contact Meg Files at masters@tucsonfestivalofbooks.org.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Submit five poems of any length, a short story or novel chapter, or a nonfiction piece or book chapter per submission.
Maximum length for prose is 5,000 words per submission.
Label each submission’s genre with the title: fiction, nonfiction, poetry.
$20 entry fee per submission
No limit to number of entries ($20 fee per entry)
Categories NOT accepted: stories for children or young adults, academic or how-to nonfiction.
Double space prose submissions.
Submit poems in a single document with appropriate page breaks (up to five poems per submission).
Submissions must be in English and unpublished at the time of submission (self-published allowed).
Writers must be age 18 or older.
The author’s name must not appear anywhere on the manuscript or the subject heading or the title of the attachment. Include name and contact information in the “Cover Letter” box only. Manuscripts with the author's name anywhere on them will be disqualified.
Authors retain all rights to submitted work.
Winning entries may be published in an anthology of winners.
Deadline: October 31, 2019
Winners and the top 50 will be notified by December 22, 2019.
First-, second-, and third-place winners in each category receive scholarships to the Masters Workshop, March, 2020. The top 50 finalists will be invited to attend the Masters Workshop ($300 fee).