The 2024 Gulf Coast Prizes

We are now accepting entries for the 2025 Gulf Coast Prizes in Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry.

SUBMISISONS OPEN: March 12-April 30

Judges: Rachel Heng (Fiction), Wei Tchou (Nonfiction), Tarfia Faizullah (Poetry)

Entries for the Gulf Coast Prizes in Fiction and Nonfiction should be a single prose work not exceeding 7,000 words. Entrants for the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry may submit up to five poems not exceeding 10 total pages in length. We only accept submissions via Submittable. Entrants may submit more than once or in more than one genre, but each new entry must be accompanied by a separate $26 entry fee.

Contest Guidelines

  • Click here for online submissions accepted via Gulf Coast’s Submittable 
  • Submit your work as a single .doc, .docx, or .pdf file.
  • Only previously unpublished work will be considered.
  • The contest will be judged blindly, so please do not include your cover letter, your name, or any contact information in the uploaded document. This information should only be pasted in the “Comments” field in Submittable.
  • Submittable accepts all major credit cards for the $26 entry fee, which includes a one-year subscription to Gulf Coast.

 

Entries for Gulf Coast Prizes in Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry are accepted annually between March 12 and April 30. The contest awards $1,500 and publication in Gulf Coast to the winner in each genre. Two honorable mentions in each genre are awarded $250. All entries are considered for publication and the entry fee includes a one-year subscription to Gulf Coast.

Rachel Heng

Rachel Heng

Rachel Heng is the author of two novels, most recently The Great Reclamation (Riverhead, 2023), which won the New American Voices Award and the AAAS Book Award, was a finalist for the Singapore Literature Prize and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the Dublin Literary Award and the HWA Gold Crown Award. The Great Reclamation was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a Best Book of 2023 by The New Yorker, TIME, Town and Country and Amazon Books, and recommended by NBC’s The Today Show, CBS Mornings, the Washington Post, TIME, USA Today and others. Rachel's short fiction has been published in The New Yorker, One Story, Best Small Fictions, Best New Singaporean Short Stories. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic and Esquire. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Wesleyan University and lives in New York City with her family.

Wei Tchou

Wei Tchou

Wei Tchou's essays and reporting can be found in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and The Oxford American, among other publications. She likes to write about food, nature, and identity. She is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and has an MFA from Hunter College. Her memoir Little Seed, a family story and a cultural history of ferns, is a finalist for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography. She lives in New York City with her family.

Tarfia Faizullah

Tarfia Faizullah

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of two poetry collections, REGISTERS OF ILLUMINATED VILLAGES (Graywolf, 2018) and SEAM (SIU, 2014). Tarfia’s writing appears widely in the U.S. and abroad in the Daily Star, Hindu Business Line, BuzzFeed, PBS News Hour, Huffington Post, Poetry Magazine, Ms. Magazine, the Academy of American Poets, Oxford American, the New Republic, the Nation, Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket, 2019), and has been displayed at the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art, and elsewhere.