The Non/Fiction Collection Prize is awarded annually to a book-length collection of short stories, essays, or a combination of the two. The prize (which in previous iterations was known as the Sandstone Prize and The Ohio State University Prize in Short Fiction) carries a cash award of $1500 and publication with The Ohio State University Press under its standard contract.
Submission deadline: February 15 – March 15, 2024
- The award is open to writers of fiction and creative nonfiction, whether or not they have previously published a book.
- Eligible submissions include an unpublished manuscript of short stories or essays; two or more novellas or novella-length essays; a combination of one or more novellas/novella-length essays and short stories/essays; a combination of stories and essays. Novellas or novella-length nonfiction must be part of a larger collection. Manuscripts may be no fewer than 150 and no more than 350 typed double-spaced pages, 12-point font. Prior publication of your manuscript as a whole in any format (including electronic or self-published) makes it ineligible. Individual stories or essays that have been previously published may be included in the manuscript. Each submission must include a list of acknowledgments of previously published work (title and magazine/journal/anthology) included in the manuscript.
- All submissions must be accompanied by a $23 entry fee ($11.50 for BIPOC writers)
- If it is a hardship to meet the submission fee, please contact our editor to discuss options for a fee waiver at prize@thejournalmag.org.
- All manuscripts will be judged anonymously. The author’s name must not appear anywhere on the manuscript. All identifying information will be submitted through the online submission manager only.
- Manuscripts may also be under consideration by other publishers, but if a manuscript is accepted for publication elsewhere, the submission should be promptly withdrawn from consideration.
- Authors may submit more than one manuscript to the competition as long as one manuscript or a portion thereof does not duplicate material submitted in another manuscript and a separate entry fee is paid.
- Manuscripts must be received in Winter 2023 via our online submission manager: https://thejournal.submittable.com/submit
- No hard-copy manuscript submissions will be considered.
- Anyone with a personal relationship to this year’s judge should refrain from submitting.
Please direct all inquiries to: prize@thejournalmag.org
About the 2024 Judge:
Thao Thai is the author of Banyan Moon, the July 2023 Read with Jenna title, Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, and Book of the Month selection. Banyan Moon was also selected by booksellers as an IndieNext pick and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Her work has been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, WIRED, Elle, Catapult, and other publications. She lives in central Ohio with her husband and daughter.
About the 2023 Winner:
Miles Harvey’s fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, The Sun, AGNI, Conjunctions, North American Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review and other publications. His most recent work of nonfiction, The King of Confidence (Little, Brown & Co., 2020), was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice selection. Harvey also wrote Painter in a Savage Land (Random House, 2008) and The Island of Lost Maps (Random House, 2000), a national bestseller. He teaches creative writing at DePaul University in Chicago, where he chairs the Department of English and is a founding editor of Big Shoulders Books, a nonprofit, social-justice publisher.
Winner
The Registry of Forgotten Objects by Miles Harvey
Finalists
Love Me, Please by JT Godfrey
Promiscuous Heretic by Lara Lillibridge
The Normal Force and Other Stories by Molia Dumbleton
Bodies of Other Women by Allison Field Bell
My Prisoner and Other Stories by Tyler McAndrew
Lucky Bodies by Marianne Erhardt
Semifinalists
Peripheral Vision by Alan Sincic
The Sky King: A choose Your Own Literary Adventure by Anna James
Hurricane Baby: Stories by Julie Whitehead
Welcome to the Man Motel by Kate Whouley
Braille Lessons for Very Tall Children by Zachary Vickers
Nothing Here is Free: Essays by Brad Wetherell
Harlan: A Letter in Essays by Allison Field Bell
Lake Crescent and Other Spirits by Pamela Gullard
Here Among the Americans: Stories by Chris Stuck
About the 2023 Judge:
Lee Martin is the author of the novels, The Bright Forever, a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; River of Heaven; Quakertown; Break the Skin; Late One Night; Yours, Jean; and The Glassmaker’s Wife. He has also published four memoirs, From Our House, Turning Bones, Such a Life, and Gone the Hard Road in addition to two short story collections, The Least You Need to Know, and, most recently, The Mutual UFO Network. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such places as Harper’s, Ms., Creative Nonfiction, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Glimmer Train, The Best American Mystery Stories, and The Best American Essays. He is the winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. He teaches in the MFA Program at The Ohio State University, where he is a College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English and a past winner of the Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching.
The 2022 Winner:
The 2022 Winner: