Contest
Porter House Review
2024 – 2025 Editor’s Prize
The Porter House Review staff is excited to announce our 2024 – 2025 Editor’s Prizes in Poetry, Nonfiction, and Fiction. This year’s contest will be judged by Rebecca Makkai, Romeo Oriogun, and Maurice Chammah. This contest will open on November 15, 2024 and will close on December 31, 2024. Winners and Finalists will be announced in April 2025. Please see below for full submission guidelines and more information on our brilliant guest judges.
Rebecca Makkai
Fiction Judge
Rebecca Makkai is the author of this year’s New York Times bestselling I Have Some Questions For You as well as the novels The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, and the short story collection Music for Wartime. The Great Believers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize among other honors. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca teaches graduate fiction writing at Northwestern University, UNR Tahoe, and Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English; and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago. She lives in Chicago and Vermont.
Romeo Oriogun
Poetry Judge
Romeo Oriogun is the author of Sacrament of Bodies (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), short-listed for the 2021 Lambda Award for Gay Poetry, Nomad (Griots Lounge Press, 2022), which won the 2022 Nigeria Prize for Literature, and The Gathering of Bastards (University of Nebraska Press, 2023), a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. He is the youth program coordinator in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa and lives in North Liberty, Iowa.
Maurice Chammah
Nonfiction Judge
Maurice Chammah is a staff writer at The Marshall Project, where he was on a team that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. His first book, Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty, was published by Crown in 2021, and won the Writers’ League of Texas Nonfiction Book Award, as well as the 2019 J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Book Award. He was a 2023 senior fellow with the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University. He co-founded The Insider Prize, a contest for incarcerated writers sponsored by American Short Fiction. He lives in Austin, Texas, after periods in New York City, Cairo, and Amman.
Contest Rules & Submission Guidelines
PoetryWe seek poetic works that capture experience by reinvigorating the language of the everyday, or surprising readers with novel, rarefied text. We are particularly interested in poetry that champions inventive forms and content.
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Submit a maximum of 5 poems or fewer.
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Include the number of poems you are submitting in your submission title.
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All entries will be read blind. Before you submit, please remove your name and any other identifying information from your manuscript. Texas State University students, alumni, and faculty members are not eligible.
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All work must be submitted through our Submittable portal. We do not accept paper or emailed submissions.
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All submitted work must be previously unpublished. Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please immediately withdraw from our contest if you place your work elsewhere.
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NonfictionWe seek nonfiction that involves discovery for the reader and the writer, work that creates a dynamic of mutual construction through literary dialogue. Personal essays, creative nonfiction flash, memoir, and literary reportage are all welcome.
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Limit your submissions to 6,000 words or fewer.
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Submissions should be typed, double-spaced, and paginated.
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All entries will be read blind. Before you submit, please remove your name and any other identifying information from your manuscript. Texas State University students, alumni, and faculty members are not eligible.
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All work must be submitted through our Submittable portal. We do not accept paper or emailed submissions.
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Please send work that is previously unpublished. Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please immediately withdraw from our contest if you place your work elsewhere.
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FictionWe seek to publish fiction that is emotionally affecting, haunting, bizarre, and in firm control of the machinations of storytelling (e.g. character, scene, plot, and momentum). We welcome both traditional short stories, flash fiction, and other hybrid forms.
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Limit your submissions to 8,000 words or fewer.
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Submissions should be typed, double-spaced, paginated.
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All entries will be read blind. Before you submit, please remove your name and any other identifying information from your manuscript. Texas State University students, alumni, and faculty members are not eligible.
-
All work must be submitted through our Submittable portal. We do not accept paper or emailed submissions.
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Please send work that is previously unpublished. Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please immediately withdraw from our contest if you place your work elsewhere.
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