Accepting Entries for 2021 The Everett Southwest Literary Award

December 1, 2021

Attention, Short Story Writers living in or writing about Oklahoma, New Mexico, or Texas!

The Everett Southwest Literary Award opens January 1st, 2021, for the 2020-2021 contest season and runs through February 15th, 2021.

First place receives $5,000 and the second place manuscript will receive $3,000.

Joining previous judges such as Sandra Cisneros, Rilla Askew, Allison Hedge Coke, Lee K. Abbott, Rob Roensch, and Brian Turner, his year’s contest judge is short story author Kelli Jo Ford, whose debut collection, Crooked Hallelujah, won the Everett Southwest Literary Award in 2019 before going on to be published by Grove Press and to be named  A New York Times Editors’ Choice, an Indies Introduce, Indie Next, and LibraryReads Pick, and to receive a starred review from Publishers Weekly.

The award is open to writers residing in or writing about Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas, excluding current and former paid employees, faculty, and students of the University of Central Oklahoma. Short story manuscripts of 30,000 words+ should be submitted to everettaward@uco.edu as a PDF document. A $20.00 check or money order should be sent to:

Everett Southwest Literary Award
University of Central Oklahoma
Department of English
Dr. Constance Squires
100 N. University Drive
Edmond, OK 73034

The Everett Family Southwest Literary Award, which is just one of the many generous donations given through the Everett Family Foundation Fund, honors the late Dr. Mark Allen Everett.  “This award is unique because it aims to reward writers in this region of the country and because of the generous prize amount,” notes novelist and short story author Constance Squires, Director of the Everett Southwest Literary Award.

Things to consider:

• Manuscripts should be PDFs, sent to everettaward@uco.edu
• Manuscripts should be double-spaced and continuously paginated.
• The contest calls for a 30,000 minimum and 50,000 maximum word count.
• Individual stories within the manuscript may be previously published.
• The manuscript must be unpublished, although it may be under consideration.
• This award does not include publication, so we feel no conflict of interest with your efforts to publish your work and will be happy to hear about it if your manuscript goes under contract.
• Please provide two cover pages — one with author contact information and one with only the title of the collection.
• Author’s name should not appear anywhere within the manuscript.
• Past students or employees of the University of Central Oklahoma are ineligible.
• The contest submission fee is $20.00. Checks or money orders accepted.

Email questions to everettaward@uco.edu.