Undergraduate Creative Writing Awards

owl using a typewriter with pen and paper and coffee

The Larry McMurtry Prize in Fiction $1,000
Judged by Sabrina Orah Mark

The Max Apple Prize in Nonfiction $1,000
Judged by Casey Gerald

The Susan Wood Prize in Poetry $1,000
Judged by Matthew Olzmann

Overview

Fondren Library’s annual Undergraduate Creative Writing Awards honor Rice undergraduates who show exceptional literary promise in the genres of Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry. The awards will be given every spring.

Contest Rules

  1. Currently enrolled undergraduates may submit in as many genres as they’d like within the following page limits: one short story up to twenty pages double-spaced 12pt Times New Roman font, one piece of creative nonfiction up to twenty pages double-spaced 12pt Times New Roman font, up to five poems not to exceed ten pages total.
  2. Submissions must be original literary works and students must be the sole author of their submissions.
  3. Each submission (in each genre) must include a cover page with your name, email, phone, and your submission’s genre. Please number all pages of your submission.
  4.  You will submit your entry with a URL to a cloud service such as Google Drive, Box or Dropbox. If your document is set to Private, please share it with jeg3@rice.edu
  5. The deadline for submissions is 11:59 PM on Sunday, April 3, 2022.
  6. Winners will be announced by April 18, 2022.
  7. Prize winners’ reading April 20, 2022.

 Questions? Please contact Joe Goetz ( jeg3@rice.edu)

Application

Please provide the URL to the required document. Use Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. to generate a link to the required documents. 
Please provide the URL to the required document. Use Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. to generate a link to the required documents. 
Please provide the URL to the required document. Use Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. to generate a link to the required documents. 

Judges' Bios

The Larry McMurtry Prize in Fiction judged by Sabrina Orah Mark

Sabrina Orah Mark grew up in Brooklyn, New York. She earned a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University, an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD in English from the University of Georgia. She is the author of the book-length poetry collections The Babies (2004), winner of the Saturnalia Book Prize chosen by Jane Miller, and Tsim Tsum (2009), as well as the chapbook Walter B.’s Extraordinary Cousin Arrives for a Visit & Other Tales from Woodland Editions.  Her collection of stories, Wild Milk, was published by Dorothy in 2018. She has received fellowships from the Creative Capital Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her poetry and stories most recently appear in American Short Fiction, The Bennington Review,  Tin House (Open Bar), The Collagist, jubilat, The Believer, and have been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2007, Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (2006), and My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (2010). She has taught at Agnes Scott College, University of Georgia, Rutgers University, University of Iowa, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Goldwater Hospital and throughout the New York City and Iowa Public School System. She lives in Athens Georgia with her husband, Reginald McKnight, and their two sons. HAPPILY, her collection of essays on fairytales and motherhood which began as a monthly column in The Paris Review, is forthcoming from Random House.

The Max Apple Prize in Non-Fiction judged by Casey Gerald

Casey Gerald is the author of There Will Be No Miracles Here, a memoir that stands the American Dream narrative on its head, while straddling the complex intersection of race, class, religion and sexuality. TWBNMH was named a Best Book of the year by NPR and The New York Times, and was described by novelist Marlon James as “the most urgently political, most deeply personal, and most engagingly spiritual statement of our time.” Casey’s acclaimed longform essays include “The Black Art of Escape”, published in New York Magazine, and “Leon Bridges After Dark”, a 10,000-word cover story for Texas Monthly. His two TED Talks have been viewed over five million times, and he has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, PBS, as well as on the cover of Fast Company, in Vanity Fair, the New York Review of Books, Italian Vogue and other outlets. A native Texan, Casey studied at Yale College and Harvard Business School. He is based in Los Angeles. 

The Susan Wood Prize in Poetry judged by Matthew Olzmann

Matthew Olzmann is the author of Constellation Route as well as two previous collections of poetry: Mezzanines and Contradictions in the Design. A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Olzmann’s poems have appeared in the New York Times, Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prizes, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He is a Senior Lecturer of Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and also teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.