The Larry McMurtry Prize in Fiction $1,000
Judged by Ian Stansel
The Max Apple Prize in Nonfiction $1,000
Judged by Lars Horn
The Susan Wood Prize in Poetry $1,000
Judged by Jennifer Chang
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
- 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. Submit works in different genres separately. Students who have graduated are not eligible.
- Submissions must be original literary works and students must be the sole author of their submissions.
- Each submission (in each genre) must include a cover page with your name, email, phone, and your submission’s genre. This cover page will be removed and the entry anonymized before being sent to the judge. Please number all pages of your submission. Include all poems in a single document with a cover page.
- You will submit your entry using the form below, entering 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
- The deadline for submissions is 11:59 PM on February 28, 2024.
- Winners will be announced by March 20, 2024.
- Winners will be asked to read at the Fondren Undergraduate Creative Writing Showcase on April 10, 2024 at 7:00 PM as part of Inquiry Weeks. They will also receive award certificates from the Office of Undergraduate Research and Inquiry (OURI) at a lunch and reception planned for April 12, 2024.
Questions? Please contact Joe Goetz ( jeg3@rice.edu)
Application
Judges' Bios
The Larry McMurtry Prize in Fiction judged by Ian Stansel
Ian Stansel is the author of the short story collections Glossary for the End of Days (Acre Books, 2020) and Everybody’s Irish (FiveChapters, 2013), a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and the novel The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous venues such as Ploughshares, Salon, Joyland, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. A native of the Chicago area, he holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD from the University of Houston. He currently directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Louisville. He lives in Kentucky with his wife, the writer Sarah Strickley, and their two daughters.
The Max Apple Prize in Nonfiction judged by Lars Horn
Lars Horn is a writer and translator working in literary and experimental non-fiction. Their first book, VOICE OF THE FISH, won the 2020 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, the 2023 Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, and was named an Honor Book for the 2023 Stonewall Israel Fishman Nonfiction Book Award as well as an American Booksellers Association Indies Introduce Selection. The recipient of fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Kenyon Writers Workshops, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Horn’s writing has appeared in Granta, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Kenyon Review, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. Horn teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York with their wife, the writer Jaquira Díaz.
The Susan Wood Prize in Poetry judged by Jennifer Chang
Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity and Some Say the Lark, which received the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award and was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award and the PEN Open Book Award. Her essays have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, and The Volta, and she has published scholarly articles on poetics, modernism, race, and the environmental imagination in Blackwell’s Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, The Oxford Encyclopedia for Asian American Literature and Culture, and New Literary History. An essay on an Asian American ecopoetics is forthcoming in Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities. Her poems have been featured on NPR, the PBS NewsHour, and The Slowdown and have appeared in numerous publications, including American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The Ecopoetry Anthology, The New Yorker, The New York Times, A Public Space, and Yale Review. She co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman and serves as the poetry editor of the New England Review.