The 2025 Summer Short Story Award for New Writers opens for submissions in one week. The Masters Review is pleased to share that Jennine Capó Crucet will serve as this year’s guest judge! The winner of this award receives a $3,000 prize, online publication and review by our partnered agents. Submissions are open through September 7. Find more details below or on our contest page.
About the Judge
Jennine Capó Crucet is a novelist, essayist, and screenwriter. A recipient of the 2025 Joyce Carol Oates Prize and a PEN/O. Henry Prize, she’s the author of four books: the novel Say Hello To My Little Friend, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction; the novel Make Your Home Among Strangers, which won the International Latino Book Award; the multiple award-winning story collection How to Leave Hialeah; and the essay collection My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education, long-listed for the PEN/Open Book Award. A former Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times, her writing has appeared on PBS NewsHour, National Public Radio, and in publications such as the Atlantic, Condé Nast Traveler, and others. Born and raised in Miami to Cuban parents, she lives in North Carolina with her family.
Here’s what Jennine Capó Crucet is looking for:
I’m so excited to be judging this contest, and I think I’m looking for a story that’s charged with a similar excitement, one that asserts itself from the very first paragraph, doing so through a careful attention to language and to voice. And setting: I tend to fall in love with stories that have a strong sense of the world its characters inhabit. I also love stories that use humor to break my heart, though please don’t consider humor a requirement for that: I’m hoping to find a story that’ll stand the test of time and be just as heartbreaking a hundred years from now.
Submission Guidelines
- The first-place winner receives $3,000, online publication, and agency review.
- The second- and third-place finalists receive cash prizes ($300/$200), online publication, and agency review.
- Submissions of fiction or nonfiction must be under 6,000 words.
- Submitted work must be previously unpublished. This includes personal blogs, social media accounts, and other websites. Previously published work will be automatically disqualified.
- The entry fee is $20.
- Simultaneous 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, but the guest judge will read 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 September 7, 2025.
- All entries are also considered for publication in New Voices.
- Every submission will receive a response by the end of December 2025. The winners will be announced by the end of January 2026.
- AI-generated submissions will be automatically disqualified.
- Friends, family, and associates of the guest judge are not eligible for this award. Consider submitting to the winter contest instead!