It’s that time of year: Dzanc’s annual contests are open! Now through September 30th, send us your mold-breaking, gut-punching, mind-bending novels and short story and poetry collections. The winner of each contest receives an advance and publication through the press, slated for spring 2026.

We are excited to announce our featured mentor of the week: Jeff Kass! Jeff Kass teaches Tenth Grade English and Creative Writing at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor. A former champion of numerous Poetry Slams, he’s the award-winning author of two full-length poetry collections, My Beautiful Hook-nosed Beauty Queen Strut Wave and Teacher/Pizza Guy, a 2020 Michigan Notable Book; the thriller Takedown, the YA novel Center-Mid, and Knuckleheads, Independent Publishers Gold-medal winning Best Short Fiction Collection of 2011.

In Selected Poems, Keith Taylor, acclaimed poet of the Upper Midwest and the author of eighteen celebrated collections, delivers a stunning medley of his most lasting work: poems that remain vivid in the imagination, that have achieved a life beyond their first appearance on the page.

We are excited to announce our featured mentor of the week: Darren DeFrain! Darren DeFrain is the author of the story collection Inside & Out and the novel The Salt Palace. He lives in Wichita, Kansas, with his wife and daughters, and he directs the Wichita State University writing program.

We are excited to announce our featured mentor of the week: Kirstin Allio! Kirstin Allio won the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize from FC2 for her new story collection, Double-Check for Sleeping Children, coming out in 2024. Previous books are the novels Garner (Coffee House Press, LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction finalist), and Buddhism for Western Children (University of Iowa), and the story collection Clothed, Female Figure (winner of the Dzanc Short Story Collection Competition).

We are excited to announce our featured mentor of the week: Jonathan Fink! Jonathan Fink is Professor and Coordinator of Creative Writing at University of West Florida.  He has published two books of poetry: The Crossing (Dzanc, 2015) and Barbarossa: The German Invasion of the Soviet Union and the Siege of Leningrad (Dzanc, 2016).  His third book, a hybrid poetry/nonfiction collection, is forthcoming from Dzanc.

We are excited to announce our featured mentor of the week: Bill Meissner! Minnesota writer and teacher, Bill Meissner is the author of twelve books. His third novel, The Wonders of the Little World, a carnival-theme family drama, will be published in January, 2024 by Stephen F. Austin State University Press/Texas A & M University Press. His previous novels are Summer of Rain, Summer of Fire, a novel set in the protest days of the Vietnam War (Stephen F. Austin State University Press/Texas A & M Univ. Press), and Spirits in the Grass (University of Notre Dame Press), which won the Midwest Book Award.

We are excited to announce our featured mentor of the week: Sharon Dilworth! Sharon Dilworth is the author of three collections of short stories: The Long White; Women Drinking Benedictine; and Two Sides, Two Rivers, as well as two novels: Year of the Ginkgo and My Riviera. Sharon has won a National Endowment for Fiction grant, a Pushcart Prize in Fiction and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Grant. Her new novel, To Be Marquette takes place in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

We are excited to announce our featured mentor of the week: Michael Hickins! Michael Hickins is the award-winning author of The Silk Factory: Finding Threads of My Family’s True Holocaust Story. A former editor at The Wall Street Journal and author of the influential short story collection The Actual Adventures of Michael Missing (Alfred A. Knopf, Dzanc Books), he is also the author of an earlier memoir, I Lived in France and So Can You (Dzanc Books, 2019).

We are excited to announce our featured mentor of the week: Kristina Marie Darling! Kristina is the author of thirty-nine books. An expert consultant with the United States Fulbright Commission, a twice-awarded Fulbright Scholar, and a member of the peer review panel for Fulbright grants, Dr. Darling’s work has also been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry, a Civita Institute Fellowship, and nine residencies at the American Academy in Rome, where she previously served as an ambassador for recruitment.

We are excited to announce our featured mentor of the week: Jason Tougaw! Jason is the author of a memoir The One You Get, winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize, The Elusive Brain: Literary Experiments in the Age of Neuroscience (Yale UP), and Strange Cases: The Medical Case History and the British Novel.

We are excited to announce our featured mentor of the week: Catherine Browder! A fiction writer and playwright, Catherine Browder has seen her work presented regionally and in NYC. She's published stories in many great literary journals and six collections of stories/novellas and solo works, as well as a feuillet. She celebrated the publication of her first novel, The Manning Girl in November, 2023.

It’s been our immense pleasure to read such talented entries this year, and we had a deeply difficult time choosing between them. Below are our short- and longlist honorees for the Short Story Collection Prize.

Dzanc Books is pleased to announce the winner of the 2023 Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize: Lost in the Forest of Mechanical Birds by Christian Moody. In addition to publication by Dzanc in Spring 2025, the prize also comes with a $2,500 advance.

Dzanc Books is pleased to announce the winner of this year’s Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction: The Moveables by Sarah Yahm. It was selected from a pool of hundreds of manuscripts and eventually judged by three celebrated Dzanc Books authors: Mark Dunn (We Five, Ella Minnow Pea), Julie Ann Stewart (Water and Blood), and Alan Grostephan (The Banana Wars), winner of last year’s Prize for Fiction.

It’s been our immense pleasure to read such talented entries this year, and we had a deeply difficult time choosing between them. Below are our short- and longlist honorees.

We are excited to announce our featured mentor of the week: John Holman! John is the author of Squabble and Other Stories, Luminous Mysteries, a novel, and Triangle Ray, which was published by Dzanc in 2016. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Oxford American, Mississippi Review, Fiction, Terminus, and other journals.

Tulsi Gurung arrives in Pennsylvania on a day so impossibly damp and gray he wonders if he’s landed on the underside of the world. He is sixteen and brimming with wonder and fear. Born and raised in Refugee Camp Goldhap, Tulsi is technically a refugee from Bhutan, a land he’s never set eyes on.

We are excited to announce our featured mentor of the week: Andy Plattner! Andy has published six books and has a forthcoming work, Stymie, a novel in stories, scheduled to be published in the spring of 2025.

We are excited to announce our featured mentor of the week: Julie Ann Stewart! Julie earned an MFA from Spalding University and has published stories in Good River Review, Litro Magazine, PoemMemoirStory and Punch Drunk Press. Her story collection Water and Blood was published by Dzanc Books in April 2022 and was the winner the Dzanc Short Story Award.