ART&WRITINGCONTESTS
Our 2025 contests are beginning!
Contests open September 26th and close December 19th.
The Southeast Review offers four annual contests with cash awards: the Southeast Review Art Contest, the World's Best Short-Short Story Contest, the Ned Stuckey-French Nonfiction Contest, and the Gearhart Poetry Contest.
The winner in each category receives $750!
Winners and finalists in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry will be published in our biannual issue in Fall 2026, and the winner of the Art Contest will be published in the biannual or online. Winners and finalists will be notified in February 2026.
2025 JUDGES
Southeast Review Art Contest
Eli Brown is an interdisciplinary artist whose work in the field of queer ecologies spans sculpture, social practice, and public art. Often their projects involve learning trans-ness as a lineage, an evolutionary phenomenon that is not always human. Recent projects have been exhibited at the deCordova Museum & Sculpture Park Biennial, Flux Factory, Boston Sculptors Gallery, and Creative Time X. Press includes Sculpture Magazine, CULTURED, Art New England, WGBH’s Open Studio, and Chronicle 5 News. His work has been published in Trans Studies Quarterly, Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, Routledge's Artists and The Practice of Agriculture, and the long-running, queer, sex-ed comic, Not Your Mother’s Meatloaf. Eli received an MFA from SMFA at Tufts in 2018. Since then, they have taught courses at Montserrat College of Art, Maine College of Art and Design, and UMass Lowell.
World's Best Short-Short Story Contest
Kristen Arnett is the queer Floridian author of the novel STOP ME IF YOU’VE HEARD THIS ONE (Riverhead Books, 2025), which was longlisted for the Comedy Women in Print Prize; With Teeth: A Novel (Riverhead Books, 2021), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction; and the New York Times bestselling debut novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019), which was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She was awarded a Shearing Fellowship at Black Mountain Institute, has held residencies at Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Millay Colony, and the Studios of Key West, and was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She runs the substack “Dad Lessons.” Her work has appeared at The New York Times, TIME, Vogue, The Cut, Oprah Magazine, PBS Newshour, The Guardian, Salon, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. Her upcoming short fiction collection, Party at the End of the World, will be published by Riverhead Books. She has a Masters in Library and Information Science from Florida State University and lives in Orlando, Florida.
Ned Stuckey-French Nonfiction Contest
Porochista Khakpour is the award-winning Iranian-American author of the novels Sons and Other Flammable Objects, The Last Illusion, and Tehrangeles, as well as the memoir Sick and essay collection Brown Album. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Bookforum, Elle, Slate, and many others. Among her many fellowships is a National Endowment for the Arts award. She has taught at Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Bard, Wesleyan, Fordham, and more for the past 20 years. Her most recent book Tehrangeles (Pantheon, 2024) was an Indie Next Pick, an NPR Book of the Day, one of TIME's 25 Most Anticipated Books of 2024, as well as one of the "Best Books of 2024” by Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and W; it has also been longlisted for the 2025 Joyce Carol Oates Prize and the 2025 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. She was born in Tehran, raised in LA's San Gabriel Valley, and currently lives in NYC's Harlem.
For more info see porochistakhakpour.com.
Gearhart
Poetry Contest
Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Wildness Before Something Sublime (Copper Canyon Press, 2025) and Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize, the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award, as well as four chapbooks. Her honors include multiple Pushcart Prizes, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Cleveland State University, where she was the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Publishing and Writing. Her poems appear in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Atlantic, POETRY, and elsewhere. She is a Provost Fellow at the University of Cincinnati and teaches in Pacific University’s M.F.A. program.
Contest Guidelines
Southeast Review Art Contest
2020 was the inaugural year of our art contest, and we are thrilled to continue it in tandem with our journal’s goal of drawing attention to and supporting the work of a wide variety of artists and art forms.
We welcome art submissions in all art genres: drawing, painting, illustration, photography, comics, video art, and so on—if you can name it, we’re interested. Artists should send in a portfolio of 8 of their best works and include a list of titles, dates, materials, and dimensions. These works can be previously advertised or published in other journals or previously exhibited in galleries. Do not include personal identification information within your submissions.
World's Best Short-Short Story Contest
In 1986, Jerome Stern, the then-director of Florida State University’s creative writing program, founded this contest to celebrate micro fiction. Submissions had to be under 250 words, and the winner received a crate of oranges as well as a check. Stern passed away from cancer in 1996, and though the guidelines and prize have changed since, we continue holding the contest in Stern’s memory, with a modern master of the short-short story judging the entries annually.
Please send up to three short-short stories per submission. Each short-short should be no more than 500 words. Do not include personal identification information within your submissions.
Only withdraw your entire submission if none of your submitted short-shorts remain available. To withdraw a single short-short, please add a note to your submission with the title you would like to remove from consideration. (Please notify us via Submittable only.)
Ned Stuckey-French Nonfiction Contest
Our nonfiction contest was established in honor of Dr. Ned Stuckey-French, whose legacy will last as one of service to the literary community, his students, hospital workers’ unions, and beyond. His spirit of selfless service is a model we aspire to, and his unflinching dedication to truth and its telling inspires the nonfiction we publish and produce.
We seek submissions in this vein: nonfiction that prods and pressures expectations; that speaks to the personal against the powerful; and that prioritizes soul, heart, and service. Please send essays of up to 10 pages. Do not include personal identification information within your submissions.
Gearhart Poetry Contest
Our poetry contest began in 1996 to honor Michael Wm. Gearhart, a Ph.D. student in creative writing at Florida State University who died suddenly at the age of 39 as he was completing the final steps of his degree. The contest continues today in his memory.
Please send up to three poems, no more than 10 pages total. Include no more than one poem per page. Do not include personal identification information within your submissions.
Only withdraw your entire submission if none of your submitted poems remain available. To withdraw a single poem, please add a note to your submission with the title you would like to remove from consideration. (Please notify us via Submittable only.)
Submissions for Currently or Formerly Incarcerated Writers
If you are a currently or formerly incarcerated writer, or if you are submitting on behalf of one, you may submit to the contest for free via mail (see address below), or by contacting the Editor at southeastreview@gmail.com.
Address
Southeast Review
Department of English
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306