NEW ORLEANS — The annual writing contests for the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival (TWFest) and Saints + Sinners LGBTQ+ Literary Festival (SASFest) are open to submissions now until October in fiction, poetry, and one-act plays.
TWFest contest details include the following:
One-Act Play – Judge: Justin Maxwell. Prize: $1500, professional staged reading at the 2025 Festival, publication in Bayou magazine, and a 2025 VIP festival pass. Deadline: October 1.
Fiction – Judge: Chin-Sun Lee. Prize: $1500, domestic airfare (up to $500) and accommodations to attend the 2025 Festival, a 2025 VIP festival pass, and a public reading at the 2025 festival. Deadline: October 1.
Poetry – Judge: Karisma Price. Prize: $1000, a 2025 VIP festival pass, and a public reading at the 2025 festival. Deadline: October 15.
Very Short Fiction – Judge: Annell López. Prize: $500, a 2025 VIP festival pass, and a public reading at the 2025 festival. Deadline: October 15.
Winners and Finalists for all categories will have their photos and bios published on our website, newsletter, and social media, and will receive a literary discussion pass ($100 value) to the 2025 festival.
Full details for each writing contest category are on our website at: http://tennesseewilliams.net/contests.
More about our judges for this year’s TWFest contests:
Justin Maxwell teaches playwriting in the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans. His playwriting book The Playwright’s Toolbox was published by Applause Books in May 2024. Currently, he’s adapting the Tennessee Williams novel Moise and the World of Reason into a full-length play. His “100 MDQs for Plays of Praise” was presented as part of Erik Ehn’s 100K project. His play An Outopia for Pigeons is out from Original Works Publishing, and Your Lithopedion is out from Next Stage Press. His play Palimpsests of Agrippina Minor was awarded at ATLAS-BoR Grant in 2020-21 His prose has appeared in multiple journals including Theatre/Practice, Eleven Eleven, The Fourth River, Minnesota Playlist, Contemporary Theatre Review, American Theatre Magazine, and others. He is a former Co-Chair of the Playwriting Symposium at the Mid-America Theatre Conference.
Chin-Sun Lee is the author of the debut novel Upcountry (Unnamed Press 2023), listed among Publishers Weekly’s Big Indie Books of Fall 2023 and Debutiful’s Most Anticipated Debut Books of 2023. She’s one of Poets & Writers’ 5 Over 50 Debut Authors of 2023 and is also a contributor to the New York Times-bestselling anthology Women in Clothes (Blue Rider Press/Penguin 2014). Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Rumpus, Joyland, and The Believer Logger, among other publications.
Karisma Price is an assistant professor of English at Tulane University. A poet, screenwriter, and media artist, she is the author of I’m Always So Serious (Sarabande Books, 2023). Her work has appeared in publications including Poetry, Indiana Review, Oxford American, Four Way Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, and elsewhere. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, was a finalist for the 2019 Manchester Poetry Prize, was awarded the 2020 J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and is the 2023 winner of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. A native New Orleanian, she holds an MFA in poetry from New York University, where she was a Writers in the Public Schools Fellow. Karisma is currently writing a television pilot.
Annell López is the author of the short story collection I’ll Give You A Reason published by the Feminist Press. She’s also the winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize. Her work has received support from Tin House and the Kenyon Review Workshops and has appeared in Guernica, American Short Fiction, Michigan Quarterly Review, Brooklyn Rail, Refinery29, and elsewhere. Annell received her MFA from the University of New Orleans. She is working on a novel.
SASFest contest details include the following:
Fiction – Judge: Greg Herren. Prize: $500 to the winner and $100 each to two runners-up. Deadline: October 1.
Poetry – Judge: Nikki Ummel. Prize: $500 to the winner and $100 each to two runners-up. Deadline: October 15.
Winners and Finalists for both categories will have their pieces published in our SASFest anthologies to be released at the 2025 SASFest. They will also have their photos and bios published on our website, newsletter, and social media.
More about our judges for this year’s SASFest contests:
Greg Herren is the author of over 30 novels, 50 short stories, and has edited over 20 anthologies. He has won several awards for his writing and editing, and has been nominated for a multitude of others, including the Shirley Jackson, the Lefty, the Agatha, and the Anthony. His most recent novels are Mississippi River Mischief (October 2023) and Death Drop (November 2023).
Nikki Ummel is a queer artist and has been published by Gulf Coast, The Georgia Review, Black Lawrence Press, and others. She is the 2022 recipient of the Leslie McGrath Poetry Prize and 2023 recipient of the Juxtaprose Poetry Award for her manuscript, Bloom. Nikki is the co-founder of LMNL, an arts organization focused on readings, workshops, and residencies. She has two poetry chapbooks, Hush (Belle Point Press, 2022) and Bayou Sonata (NOLA DNA, 2023), funded by the New Orleans’ Jazz and Heritage Foundation.
Full details for each writing contest category are on our website at: https://www.sasfest.org/#contests
Our SASFest contests are supported by the John Burton Harter Foundation and Rebel Satori Press.
The 2025 Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival will be held March 26 – 30, 2025 and Saints + Sinners LGBTQ+ Literary Festival will be held March 28 – 30, 2025.
Follow the festivals on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @TWFestNOLA and @SASFest.
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