Submissions to our fifteenth(!) anthology open in just over one week, and we’re thrilled to announce that Ramona Ausubel will be selecting this year’s finalists! Best Emerging Writers 2026 will showcase a collection of prose from ten emerging writers who are bold and brave, who tell stories only they can tell, stories that must be told now. Each of our ten finalists will receive a $700 prize, along with publication in print and online. Submissions open on April 6 and will close on June 7, 2026. Find out more about the contest below, or on our contest page.
About the Judge
Ramona Ausubel is the national bestselling author of five books of fiction, most recently The Last Animal which won the National Book Foundation Science + Literature Prize. Unstuck: 101 doorways leading from the blank page to the last page, a writer’s guide, will be published by Tin House Zando in April 2026. She is the recipient of the PEN/USA Fiction Award, the Cabell First Novelist Award and has been a finalist for both the California and Colorado Book Awards and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review daily, One Story, Tin House, The Oxford American, Ploughshares and elsewhere. She is a professor at Colorado State University and lives in Boulder with her family.
Guidelines:
- Submissions of fiction or creative nonfiction must be under 8,000 words.
- Submitted work must be previously unpublished, which includes publication on personal blogs, social media accounts, and other websites. Previously published work will be automatically disqualified.
- The entry fee per submission is $20.
- Simultaneous submissions and multiple submissions are allowed, though each submission requires a $20 entry fee.
- Writers from historically marginalized or underrepresented groups are invited to submit for free until we reach fifty submissions in this category.
- If your submission is accepted elsewhere, please withdraw your submission on Submittable, or contact us otherwise to let us know the piece is no longer available.
- We do not require anonymous submissions for this contest, though the guest judge will review the shortlist anonymously.
- This contest is for emerging writers only. Writers with single-author book-length work published or under contract with a major press are ineligible. We are interested in providing a platform to new writers; authors with books published by indie presses are welcome to submit unpublished work, as are self-published authors.
- International submissions are allowed, provided the work is written primarily in English.
- No translations, please.
- All submissions must be double-spaced with one-inch page margins and use 12pt Times New Roman or Garamond font.
- The contest’s deadline is 11:59pm PDT on June 7, 2026.
- All entries are also considered for publication in New Voices.
- Every submission will receive a response by the end of September 2026. The winners will be announced in October 2026.
- Friends, family, and close associates of the guest judge are ineligible for this award.
- Writers whose work appears in previous editions of our anthology are ineligible for this award.
Ten winners will receive:
- a $700 award;
- publication in our internationally distributed anthology and on our website;
- a contributor’s copy;
- and exposure to over fifty literary agencies as part of our exclusive mailing. We send our anthology to editors, writers, and literary institutions across the country.