The 2021 Gulf Coast Prizes

We are now accepting entries for the 2021 Gulf Coast Prizes in Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry.

Deadline: April 15, 2021

Judges: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Fiction), Natalie Diaz (Poetry), and Kiese Laymon (Nonfiction).

Entries for the Gulf Coast Prizes in Fiction and Nonfiction should be a single prose work not exceeding 7,000 words. Entrants for the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry may submit up to five poems not exceeding 10 total pages in length. We will accept submissions both via Submittable and via postal mail. Entrants may submit more than once or in more than one genre, but each new entry must be accompanied by a separate $23 entry fee.

Contest Guidelines

  • Click here for online submissions accepted via Gulf Coast’s Submittable 
  • Submit your work as a single .doc, .docx, or .pdf file.
  • Only previously unpublished work will be considered.
  • The contest will be judged blindly, so please do not include your cover letter, your name, or any contact information in the uploaded document. This information should only be pasted in the “Comments” field in Submittable.
  • Submittable accepts all major credit cards for the $23 entry fee, which includes a one-year subscription to Gulf Coast.

 

 

 

 

Entries for Gulf Coast Prizes in Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry are accepted annually between February 15 and April 15. The contest awards $1,500 and publication in Gulf Coast to the winner in each genre. Two honorable mentions in each genre are awarded $250. All entries are considered for publication and the entry fee includes a one-year subscription to Gulf Coast.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is the New York Times-bestselling author of Friday Black. Originally from Spring Valley, New York, he graduated from SUNY Albany and went on to receive his MFA from Syracuse University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming from numerous publications, including the New York Times Book Review, Esquire, Literary Hub, the Paris Review, Guernica, and Longreads. He was selected by Colson Whitehead as one of the National Book Foundation's “5 Under 35” honorees, is the winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award for Best First Book and the Aspen Words Literary Prize.

Natalie Diaz is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press, and her second book, Postcolonial Love Poem,  was published by Graywolf Press in March 2020. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Lannan Literary Fellow, a United States Artists Ford Fellow, and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. Diaz is Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi, and author of the bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir. Laymon is a Contributing Editor at Vanity Fair and Oxford American. He has written for New York Times, Esquire, VSB, ESPN The Magazine, the Paris Review, NPR, Colorlines, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Ebony, Guernica, Fader, Travel & Leisure, Lit Hub, and many others. He is the Hubert H. McAlexander Chair of English at the University of Mississippi, and recipient of 2020-2021 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard.