Deadline: 30-Nov-2025
The J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction is seeking carefully crafted short stories with vivid characters who encounter grace in everyday settings.
This prize provides a unique opportunity for writers to share their work with a wider audience while exploring themes of grace and human experience in contemporary life. It encourages both emerging and established authors to submit work that captures moments of transcendence in everyday settings, revealing characters navigating the intersection of the ordinary and the extraordinary.
The prize offers $700 for first place and $300 for second place, with up to eight honorable mentions receiving publication in the journal along with a one-year subscription. Winners of the J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction will be announced in Spring 2026 and published throughout the subsequent issues that year. There is no reading fee to submit.
Authors may submit only one story per entry, and previously published work is not eligible. Simultaneous submissions are allowed, but authors must withdraw their work immediately if it is accepted elsewhere. Submissions must include contact information such as email and mailing address, along with one or two lines of biographical information as it should appear if published. All stories must adhere to the word limit of 8,000 words, with longer submissions returned unread.
The deadline for applications is 30 November 2025.
For more information, visit Dappled Things.