The FuPo Poetry Contest is for “funny and poignant” poems under 60 lines. 3/5/21 deadline. More here.
The Ceiling 200 Contest is for very short fiction or prose poetry under 200 words long. 3/5/21 deadline. More here.
Submission window: The FuPo PoCo and the Ceiling 200 Contests open on February 1st and have a March 5th deadline.
A note about entry fees: We want everyone to be able to submit, even if they can’t afford a fee, even though the main function of a contest is ostensibly a fundraiser. We’re also here to raise funds for writers. That said, we’re super happy for all donations and submissions and we pay it forward every chance we get. We’re hoping next year we’ll be able to raise our authors payment even above what we’re able to pay now—we’re at $30 and we’re hoping to make it to $50 in the next few years, but we need your help!
Prizes: Each contest will have $250 first prize, $100 second prize and $50 third prize—and all of the pieces submitted will be considered for publication at the normal rate (this year that would be $30).
We have 2 portals for each contest but all pieces will be considered equally. You can submit to the regular portal as many times as you’d like and the “No Fee Portal” only once (but you can submit to the no fee and the normal portal). We want everyone to be able to submit and have a shot at fame and fortune, and while we provide neither, we are giving out a little chunk of change and we will very vocally support your win and all of your future projects. You may submit to the paid portal as many times as you like, in fact we encourage it! We’re using these funds to support the journal which is 90% paying authors, 10% website/Submittable fees and 0% paying editors—we’re in it for the love, baby!
No Fee Portal: 1 piece may be submitted no fee. An additional piece may be included with the $5 tip option. This portal may only be used once per contest per submitter.
Regular Portal Entry Fee: Up to 3 pieces may be submitted for $10. For an additional $10 you may submit up to 6 pieces and your name and a link of your choice will be added to the “Benefactors” list with each issue for the next year.
Can a writer submit to both portals for the same contest? Absolutely. You can submit to the regular portal as many times as you’d like, and the no fee portal just the once (per contest)
The “In One Go” Folio Contest is for selections of work that are best read together, hence the name. We’re accepting prose, poetry and anything in between. For poetry submissions we’re looking for poetry roughly 5-14 poems (under 24 pages) and for prose 3-10 pieces of short fiction (under 1500 words each, totaling no more than 10k words). This folio will appear as a feature in issue #7, and also as an artistically designed standalone pdf.
Entry fees: $10. Like Pay it Forward options, we’re offering a ‘donation’ option of an additional $10 which will go entirely to the author on top of the prize and in the note introducing the prize winners the ‘patrons’ will get a thank you.
Prize: $200 prize. All pieces submitted will be considered for publication at the normal rate (this year that would be $30 for an individual piece or $100 for a feature). And this is just an estimate—if we have a busy enough ‘Pay it Forward’ submission season before the contest kicks off, the prize may be doubled even—we’ll have an updated total before we start reading.
The FuPo Poetry Contest is for “funny and poignant” poems under 60 lines. We want witty, we want dark humor, we want to look at things in a new way or learn a fact that fits perfectly into a well-told-tale. We aren’t looking for linguistic puzzles, but we’re also not looking for Ogden Nash—apologies to Nashites, but it’s not for us.
The Ceiling 200 Contest is for very short fiction or prose poetry under 200 words long. We want all sorts but make them interesting, make them memorable. The ceiling is 200 words, but the story should break through that ceiling in our minds. Give us your icebergs and your sudden prose that pops back into our minds when we’re trying to get to sleep at 3am.
The “In One Go” Folio Contest is essentially a digital chapbook contest. Chapbooks can be of a wide variety of lengths, what we’re mainly concerned with (aside from the standard ‘excellence’) would be that the pieces work well together. They don’t have to be an actual sequence or connected in any specific way, but they should have a cohesion that lends itself to being read together. In one sitting as opposed to sporadically over the course of months. This can mean a whole lot of different things, and there’s a lot of stock to still put in ‘basic excellence’, but there it is. Read our issues and pay attention to what we say we like, (don’t pizza when you should french fry) and we’re all gonna have a good time.