The Guild Literary Complex is now accepting submissions for their 2015 prose awards for short fiction and non-fiction.
Every fall, the Guild Complex acknowledges emerging and established writers via a judged competition and recognition at the historic Chopin Theatre in Chicago. A cash prize of $500 in each category (fiction and non-fiction) will be awarded to an original unpublished work. The deadline to submit is Thursday, October 22 at 5:00 pm.
Three semi-finalist from each category will read their work at our annual Prose Awards event, and the winners will be announced live that evening. The recognition event will be held on Thursday, November 12 at 7:30 pm at the Chopin Theater.
Writers of all backgrounds and experience levels are invited to submit, and all themes and subjects are welcome. Full submission guidelines can be found here, and submissions can be sent to contest@guildcomplex.org.
Judges include:
ANNE CALCAGNO is a dual-national, Chicago based, award-winning author. Her books include the novel Love Like A Dog, the story collection Pray For Yourself, and the travelogue Travelers’ Tales: Italy. Love Like A Dog won First Place in the category First Novel from the New Generation Indie Book Awards, among other prizes. For stories in her collection Pray For Yourself, Anne received the San Francisco Foundation Phelan Literary Award, as well as an NEA and two Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowships. Her fiction has appeared in The North American Review, TriQuarterly, Denver Quarterly,Epoch, and a number of anthologies, including Don’t Tell Mama!, an anthology of Italian-American writing, In the Middle of the Middle West: Literary Nonfiction from the Heartland and Whose Panties Are These? More Misadventures from Funny Women on the Road. She won an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award for her story ‘What’s Yours?’ published in Other Voices. She is currently at work on her second novel, Struck By Dina, about the Italian colonization of East Africa, and she teaches writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
S.L. WISENBERG is the author of the nonfiction book The Adventures of Cancer Bitch, as well as the essay collection, Holocaust Girls: History, Memory & Other Obsessions and the short story collection The Sweetheart Is In. She has received a Pushcart Prize and awards and fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council and Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She was a feature writer at the Miami Herald and has taught at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. Her work has appeared in dozens of anthologies as well as magazines such as the New Yorker, Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Creative Nonfiction. She served as creative nonfiction editor ofACM/Another Chicago Magazine, where she is now an editor emeritus. Wisenberg holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and she teaches in the MA/MFA Writing Program at Northwestern University.
For 25 years, the Guild Literary Complex has been a Chicago–based literary organization presenting and supporting diverse, divergent, and emerging voices through programming that is as dynamic as Chicago itself. Actively working with individuals and organizations from all of Chicago’s many neighborhoods, the Guild seeks to connect seemingly disparate groups and geographies through literature—bringing unexpected writers, programs, and audiences together.
