The 2024 MAYDAY Prizes in short fiction, creative nonfiction, and micro-chapbook poetry are still open! Now more than ever, we need to promote and celebrate the aware and engaged writing our judges seek this year.
Extended deadline: November 15, 2024.
MAYDAY will award cash prizes for all three fiction, nonfiction, and poetry categories:
- $500 for first place
- $250 for second place
- $100 for runners up
All winners will receive digital publication at the MAYDAY website. Follow the links in each individual prize’s title to submit! Entry fee is $20.
Note: Regular submissions for poetry, fiction and nonfiction will be closed from November 1st 2024 to January 1st 2025 while we read prize submissions.
The MAYDAY 2024 Creative Nonfiction Prize
Theme: Hope is action
In “Hope in the Dark” Rebecca Solnit famously proclaimed, “Hope is action.” What does it look like to cultivate hope in uncertain, anxious, and grief-filled times? What can hopeful action look like and what forms can it take? How do we showcase hopeful action in all of its complexity? What are small actions with radical intent?
Whether climate dread, political upheaval, or violence close to home and abroad, despair can sometimes feel like the only path forward. But times like these call for vision, decision, and action even if the end results are unclear. This year we’re looking for essays that move readers toward action, reflection, and hope without oversimplifying.
Thoughtfully crafted narrative essays that incorporate personal experience, research, cultural analysis, and reporting that resonate with these questions, as well as pieces that challenge the traditional form of the essay, are welcome and encouraged.
Judged by the MAYDAY Nonfiction Editors
The MAYDAY 2024 Micro-Chapbook Prize
Theme: Micro-Chapbook
MAYDAY annually publishes online a series of micro-chapbooks. Each micro-chapbook is treated as a distinct ebook with its own unique ISBN and published digitally on the MAYDAY website.
Judged by Angela Peñaredondo
Born in Iloilo City, Philippines, ANGELA PEÑAREDONDO is a queer Filipinx writer, interdisciplinary artist, educator and scholar. Peñaredondo is the author of nature felt but never apprehended (Noemi Press), All Things Lose Thousands of Times (Inlandia Institute, Winner of Hilary Gravendyk Regional Prize) and Maroon (Jamii Publications).
Peñaredondo’s work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets, Pleiades, Black Warrior Review, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere. Peñaredondo has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Kundiman, VONA/Voices of our Nations Art, and Macondo. They have also received awards from TinHouse, Community of Writers and others. They are an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Humanities at California State University San Bernardino. Currently, Peñaredondo lives in Los Angeles, Gabrielino-Tongva land.
The MAYDAY 2024 Short Fiction Prize
Theme: Stories that save us
Orca uprisings. Yachts sinking. What does it mean to resist the systems of supremacy we were born into? How does the whale’s disruption at sea speak to our own agency at home? What does it mean to be liberated? When we give ourselves permission to feel: grief, anger, rage, pain; what can we create? bell hooks said “the function of art is to do more than tell it like it is – it’s to imagine what is possible.” The 2024 MAYDAY Prize in Short Fiction invites you to imagine; to unmake and remake the world with love, resistance, liberation, at its center.
Guest Judge: Lindsay Wong
LINDSAY WONG is the author of the critically acclaimed, award-winning, and bestselling memoir The Woo-Woo, which was a finalist for Canada Reads 2019. She has written a YA novel entitled My Summer of Love and Misfortune and a debut collection of short fiction, Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality, which was shortlisted for the Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes. Wong holds a BFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Winnipeg. Follow her on X/Twitter @LindsayMWong, Instagram @Lindsaywong.M, or visit www.lindsaywongwriter.com.
