Thank you for your interest! This contest in now closed, and winners have been announced.
Ready for a bit of fun? Get your pens ready: We're running a themed flash fiction contest.
Judge: Gwendolyn Kiste
Theme: Home
Entry fee: $5
Length: 350 words or less
Winner: $100+ and publication
Finalists: Publication
Deadline: May 22, 11:59 PST
Winners announced: June 5
Note on fees and prizes: Since we’re still a small fish in a big sea of literary magazines, we’re not sure how many submissions we might receive. We’re also hoping to raise some money towards Issue IV production costs, like paying our authors and cover artist. Keeping this in mind, we went with a flexible approach to prizes: If we receive more than 60 submissions, we will increase the winning prize by $25 dollars for every 10 submissions.
Theme: Home. Home as a place, home in a person, home in belonging, home as a painfully real, beastly creature—or any other interpretation. But remember, all you write must fit our regular guidelines. This means, we’ll be looking for magic realism, and for stories that take us back into ourselves, stories that take us home.
About our judge: Gwendolyn Kiste is a speculative fiction author based in Pennsylvania. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Shimmer, Interzone, Bracken, Black Static, Nightmare, and Three-Lobed Burning Eye, among other outlets. Her debut fiction collection, And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe, is available now from JournalStone. You can find her online at gwendolynkiste.com.
A note from our judge: "I would love to see tales of forests and folklore and faraway homes. Send your most beautifully devastating or beautifully hopeful stories, all in the magical Bracken tradition."
Rules:
- One piece per submission.
- Each piece must be accompanied by the $5 entry fee.
- Additional entries are welcome, but must be part of a separate submission and entry fee.
- All work must be previously unpublished.
- Simultaneous submission are permitted. Please let us know immediately if the piece is accepted elsewhere.
- We are open to prose poems and vignettes in addition to the typical fiction pieces.
- All submissions will be considered for publication in future issues of Bracken.
- All entries will be judged "blind."
- Each piece will be read by Gwendolyn Kiste.