Pinch Literary Award in Poetry
Winner receives $2,000 and publication in our fall issue.
We accept original work that has not previously been published. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable. You may submit as many entries as you would like, however, please limit the number of poems per entry to THREE and do not exceed TEN total pages. All submissions are judged blind.
To submit, please use our online submissions portal via submittable, where you will find further guidelines. Each entry fee is $25. We abide by the CLMP code of ethics.
The prize is offered thanks to the generous support of the Hohenberg Foundation.
Pinch Literary Award in Fiction
Winner receives $2,000 and publication in our fall issue.
We accept original work that has not previously been published. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable. You may submit as many entries as you would like, however, please limit your stories to 4,000 or fewer words. All submissions are read blind.
To submit, please use our online submissions portal via submittable, where you will find further guidelines. Each entry fee is $25. We abide by the CLMP code of ethics.
The prize is offered thanks to the generous support of the Hohenberg Foundation.
Page Prize in Nonfiction
Winner receives $1,000 and publication in our fall issue.
This award, named for our founder, is for flash nonfiction. We accept original work that has not previously been published. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable. You may submit as many entries as you would like, however, please limit your essay to 1,000 or fewer words. All submissions are read blind.
Our judge this year is Justin St. Germain. He teaches creative nonfiction and true crime courses. He is the author of the book-length essay Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, part of IG Publishing’s Bookmarked series, as well as the internationally acclaimed memoir Son of a Gun. He grew up in Tombstone, Arizona, received his BA and MFA at the University of Arizona, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow and Marsh McCall Lecturer at Stanford.
To submit, please use our online submissions portal via submittable, where you will find further guidelines. Each entry fee is $12. We abide by the CLMP code of ethics.
Previous Contest Winner and Judges
“We’re excited to announce the results of The 2024 Page Prize in Creative Nonfiction, judged by Justin St. Germain!”
Contest Winners for 2023. Their work will be published in our fall issue.
Caitlin Gunthorp won the 2023 Page Prize in Nonfiction for “Conversations in Colic Season.”
Paul Riker won the 2023 PLA Prize in Fiction for “A Gathering”
2022 PInch Literary Award for Poetry
2022 PInch Literary Award for Fiction
Emily Franklin is a novelist and poet whose poem, “The Math of Cows,” won the 2021 Pinch Literary Award in Poetry, judged by Catherine Pierce. She has published 16 YA novels. Tell Me How You Got Here (Terrapin Books, 2021) is her first volume of poetry.
Nicole Baute is the winner of the 2018 Pinch Literary Award for her fiction story “You Will Be Extraordinary.” She grew up in Southwestern Ontario and has lived in many places including Toronto, Vancouver, and New Delhi, India. Her short stories and essays have been published by Joyland, River Teeth, carte blanche, Cleaver, and Wigleaf, and she placed third in the Mythic Picnic Fiction Prize. Nicole teaches creative writing online as part of Sarah Selecky Writing School and is pursuing her MFA at the University of British Columbia. e
Jennifer Givhan, a Mexican-American poet and novelist, has earned an NEA and a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices fellowship. Her books include Landscape with Headless Mama (2015 Pleiades Editors’ Prize), Protection Spell (2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize Series), Girl with Death Mask (2017 Blue Light Books Prize), Rosa’s Einstein (2019 Camino Del Sol Poetry Series), and two novels, Trinity Sight and Jubilee (Blackstone Publishing). Her honors include the Frost Place Latinx Scholarship, a National Latinx Writers’ Conference Scholarship, the Lascaux Review Poetry Prize, Phoebe Journal’s Greg Grummer Poetry Prize, The Pinch Poetry Prize, the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize 2nd place, and fifteen Pushcart nominations. Her work has appeared in Best of the Net, Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Ploughshares, POETRY, TriQuarterly, Boston Review, AGNI, Crazyhorse, Witness, Southern Humanities Review, Missouri Review, and The Kenyon Review. She lives near the Sleeping Sister volcanoes in New Mexico with her family, and can be found discussing feminist motherhood at jennifergivhan.com, Facebook, & Twitter @JennGivhan. We recently sat down with her to discuss her writing habits:
Kate Gaskin is the author of Forever War (YesYes Books 2020), which won the Pamet River Prize. Her poems have appeared in Guernica, Pleiades, Passages North, 32 Poems, Cherry Tree, and Blackbird, among others. She is a recipient of a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, as well as the winner of The Pinch’s 2017 Literary Award in Poetry. She grew up in a small town in central Alabama and currently lives in Omaha, Nebraska.
Marina Petrova’s stories have appeared in The Conium Review, Catapult, and the Empty Mirror. Her writing also has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, LARB, the Late Night Library, and Sugared Water. She holds an MFA from The New School and received fellowship from The MacDowell Colony and from The Mineral School. Although she did not place in the 2018 Pinch Literary Awards, her fiction story “Monkey” was still selected for publication in issue 38.2 of The Pinch due to the quality of the piece.
Contest participants can be selected for publication even if they don’t win the contest. Check out this interview with Lela Tredwell to learn how this contest participant caught the attention of editors and got her piece published! “My Eye Eye” was published in issue 38.2 of The Pinch, which is available for order.
Amy Bonnaffons is the judge of the 2019 Pinch Literary Award for Fiction. Her debut story collection The Wrong Heaven was published in July 2018 by Little, Brown. It will be followed in early 2020 by The Regrets, a novel about the afterlife. Amy is a founding editor of 7x7.la, a literary journal devoted to collaborations between writers and visual artists. Born in New York City, she now lives in Athens, GA, where she is working on a Ph.D. at the University of Georgia.
After last week’s conversation with current Pinch Literary Awards nonfiction judge Elissa Washuta, The Pinch staff decided to reach out to past contestant Sarah Viren. Sarah was the nonfiction winner of The 2014 Pinch Literary Awards with her Nonfiction essay “My Murderer’s Futon” which was featured in The Pinch 35.1.
We talked to Molly Beer, winner of the 2013 Pinch Literary Awards in creative nonfiction.
We chatted with poet Carrie Green, who won our contest in poetry in 2013!
We talked to Kate Gaskin, winner of the Pinch Literary Awards in poetry in 2017 with her poem "What the War Was Not."
Joseph Rein, contributor in issue 33.2 of The Pinch, has some exciting news this March. Not only is his first feature-length film being released, but so is his first short story collection Roads Without Houses. We spoke to him about his upcoming works, his writing background, and which fictional world he'd choose to live in.
In 2007, Brad Aaron Modlin won second place in The Pinch's River City Writing Award in Poetry with his poem, “What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade." The poem recently went viral, so we asked Brad a few questions about his writing, his views on social media, and his connection to poetry.
“Finally, I hand my uncle the three Napa cabbages. He unwraps the scarf and hands it to his wife, who is pleased. He gives one of the cabbages back to me. I think he is also pleased, but then I make the mistake of saying these are also from my father, but he sees the lie and laughs.”
““Did he take the head? You’ll never make us believe otherwise. Yeah, we think he took the head, because it was evidence of a murder,” Galveston District Attorney Kirk Sistrunk later told Dateline. Without Black’s head there was no way to tell how close Durst had been when he shot his neighbor, at what angle, or from what direction. In other words, there was no way to know if we should believe his story of self-defense or not.”