Awards

We will award one prize at each level for poetry, and one for prose.

Guidelines

Contest entries will be accepted until the stroke of midnight, U.S. Pacific Time, on December 2, 2013. (In other words, make sure your entries are in before 11:59 pm on December 1).
There are no genre restrictions for this contest, and content guidelines are similar to our standard submission guidelines, including what we are not accepting.
Contest Three awards prizes for poetry and prose according to our contest judging criteria.
Prose includes both fiction and creative nonfiction, but we have not divided the category further because we believe that well-written creative nonfiction should tell a story so well that the result is indistinguishable from fiction. Prose must be less than 12,000 words.
Poetry includes all styles, meters, and rhyme schemes, or may be free-form. Poetry must be less than 150 lines.

Rules & Restrictions

• Publication Rights remain with the author or poet. Grand Prize winners are not obligated to publish their winning entry in Spark, but if our publication offer is accepted, the cash portion of the prize serves to purchase First Publication rights as outlined on our Rights & Rates page. All other entrants retain full rights to submit and publish their entries as they wish.
• Prose limits: We are looking for excellent writing and storytelling, not length. A compelling and well-written “flash fiction” piece has equal chance against a novelette. Prose must be less than 12,000 words.
• Poetry limits: We are looking for evocative imagery that paints a small story in a poem. A haiku or tanka has equal chance against a sonnet or epic. Poetry must be less than 150 lines.
• Only previously unpublished works will be considered.
• You may enter a previously-written piece if you feel that it satisfies the prompt for this contest, so long as it has not been published.
• There are no age restrictions for this contest other than legal restrictions imposed by your local jurisdiction.
• In the event that a winner is ineligible for the Scribophile prize because of age or chooses to decline the membership, a three-year print and eBook subscription to Spark: A Creative Anthology will be substituted.
• Spark: A Creative Anthology contest judges and their immediate families are not eligible.
• Because entries are blindly judged, authors and poets who have previously had work accepted for any volume of Spark: A Creative Anthology may enter this contest. In the event that a Grand Prize winner is an author or poet whose work has been accepted for Spark: A Creative Anthology, Volume V, we may choose to postpone or decline publication of either the previously-accepted work or the winning contest entry.
• You may enter multiple pieces in this contest, and you may enter both poetry and prose, but each entrant can win at most one prize, no matter how many entries are made.
• Spark: A Creative Anthology reserves the right to post “No Award” for either category in the event that fewer than 30 total entries are received or fewer than three qualified entries can be selected for the final round of judging.
• Because this contest is judged blindly—that is, the author’s name is withheld from the judges—please omit personal information (such as author name or contact details) from the manuscript.
• Judges will be unable to provide feedback on specific pieces.

About the Guest Judges

Ken Liu’s fiction has appeared in F&SF, Asimov’s, Analog, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Clarkesworld, among other places. He has won a Nebula, two Hugos, a World Fantasy Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and been nominated for the Sturgeon and the Locus Awards. He lives near Boston with his family.

Liu’s short story The Paper Menagerie is the first work of fiction, of any length, to have swept the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards. His short story, Mono no aware won the 2013 Hugo Award, and his novella The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary was also nominated for a Hugo. (From Wikipedia.)

Bryan Thomas Schmidt is an author and editor of adult and children’s speculative fiction. His debut novel, The Worker Prince, received Honorable Mention on Barnes & Noble Book Club’s Year’s Best Science Fiction Releases for 2011 and was soon followed by additional novels and children’s books. His short stories have appeared in Digital Dragon Magazine, Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales 6, and many other magazines and anthologies. As editor, he has worked with many established authors and edited [multiple anthologies], including the forthcoming Raygun Chronicles, expected this month.

Schmidt hosts the weekly #sffwrtcht (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Chat) Wednesdays at 9 pm ET on Twitter.

Margaret Blair Young has taught literature and creative writing at Brigham Young University since 1984. She has written several novels and short story collections and has won awards including “Best In State” award in the fiction category from the State of Utah, Honorable Mention in the Katherine Anne Porter Short Fiction Contest, and the First Place Utah Arts Council Award for best collected fiction. Her current endeavor is a film to be shot in Zambia called Heart of Africa.

Young is the president of the Association for Mormon Letters.

About the Awards

Scribophile is the largest online writing workshop and discussion group, boasting over 202,000 peer critiques written by community members ranging from amateur writers to professional authors and editors. Learn more at Scribophile.com.

Duotrope is a subscription-based service for writers that offers an extensive, searchable database of current fiction, poetry, and non-fiction markets, a calendar of upcoming deadlines, submissions trackers, and useful statistics compiled from the millions of data points they’ve gathered on the publishers they list, including Spark.

Notes

Cash prizes were donated by Brian & Amy Lewis.
The Lifetime and one-year Scribophile Premium Memberships were donated by Scribophile, the online writing group for serious writers. Learn more at Scribophile.com.
The one-year Duotrope subscriptions were purchased at a discount by Brian Lewis.
Spark: A Creative Anthology is administered and published by the Empire & Great Jones Creative Arts Foundation, a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation.