Porter House Review
2023 – 2024 Editor’s Prize

The Porter House Review staff is excited to announce our 2023 – 2024 Editor’s Prizes in Poetry, Nonfiction, and Fiction. This year’s contest will be judged by Kaveh Akbar, Elisa Gabbert, and Andrew Najberg. This contest will open on December 15, 2023 and will close on January 31, 2024. Winners and Finalists will be announced in April 2024. Please see below for full submission guidelines and more information on our brilliant guest judges.

Kaveh Akbar
Poetry Judge

Kaveh Akbar‘s poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf 2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James 2017), in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry 2016). He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine (Penguin Classics 2022). In 2024, Knopf will publish Martyr!, Kaveh’s first novel. In 2020 Kaveh was named Poetry Editor of The Nation. The recipient of honors including multiple Pushcart Prizes, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, and the Levis Reading Prize, Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and teaches at the University of Iowa and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson. In 2014, Kaveh founded Divedapper, a home for dialogues with the most vital voices in American poetry. With Sarah Kay and Claire Schwartz, he wrote a weekly column for the Paris Review called “Poetry RX.”

Elisa Gabbert
Nonfiction Judge

Elisa Gabbert is the author of six collections of poetry, essays, and criticism: Normal Distance, which will be out from Soft Skull in September (available for preorder now); The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays, out now from FSG Originals and Atlantic UK; The Word Pretty (Black Ocean, 2018); L’Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems (Black Ocean, 2016); The Self Unstable (Black Ocean, 2013); and The French Exit (Birds LLC, 2010). The Unreality of Memory and The Word Pretty were both named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and The Self Unstable was chosen by the New Yorker as one of the best books of 2013. She writes the On Poetry column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Believer, The New York Times Magazine and Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the Guardian Long Read, the London Review of Books, A Public Space, The Nation, the Paris Review Daily, American Poetry Review, and many other venues. Her next collection of nonfiction, Any Person Is the Only Self, will be out in 2023 from FSG.

Andrew Najberg
Fiction Judge

Andrew Najberg is the author of The Mobius Door (Wicked House Publishing 2023), the forthcoming speculative-horror novel Gollitok (Wicked House Publishing, 2023), and the forthcoming YA dark fantasy novel The Neverborn Thief (Olive-Ridley Press, 2024). He is also the author of the collection of poems The Goats Have Taken Over the Barracks (Finishing Line Press, 2021) and the chapbook of poems Easy to Lose (Finishing Line Press, 2008). His short fiction has appeared in Prose Online, Psychopomp Review, Bookends Review, Wondrous Real, Utopia Science Fiction, Translunar Traveller’s Lounge, Fusion Fragment, and is forthcoming in Fantasy and Science Fiction as well as The Gods and Globes III anthology, the Make Your Presence Known anthology, the Solar Press 2023 anthology, and the Utopia Science Fiction Five Year Anniversary Best of Anthology. His poems have appeared in dozens of journals online and in print, including North American Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and Good River Review.

Contest Rules & Submission Guidelines

Nonfiction

We 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.

Fiction

We 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.