CRAFT Short Fiction Prize
The CRAFT Short Fiction Prize is our signature contest for unpublished short fiction up to 5,000 words, and is open to entries every March and April and awarded each September. Three winners are selected by a guest judge, with $2,800 and publication awarded.
Judges:
2018: Jim Shepard
2019: Elizabeth McCracken
2020: Alexander Chee
2021: Kirstin Valdez Quade
Blackbird by Chinonyelum Anyichie
Ifunanya called you ugly, and you answered her with a slap. A slap so charged it was the envy of thunder, and you didn’t even care you were in Chuckies, the school restaurant, teeming with people eating, laughing, coming…
A Line of Wings by Uyen Phuong Dang
Dau used to live in the apartment below me. He had skin so dry it fell like leaves on a windy day, so much he pixelated his floor with tiny fog-colored flakes, each thin and flappy as a plastic…
Cillian by Janey Tracey
When the night was over, and everyone else had gone, Cillian took me to an Irish bar, scratched the small of my back, and told me his theory of everything. He told me political polarization was related to wave…
Question Twenty-Eight by Lisa K. Buchanan
When my widowed father was the age I am now, he married a woman the age I was then. The thirty-year difference didn’t bother his friends, though some objected to his haste, claiming he had but transferred my mother’s…
Ghosts by Amy Stuber
People will say Ry must have planned the robbery for weeks. They’ll want purpose and emotion and strategy. They’ll say she had a gun tucked into a pocket. They’ll say she must have been desperate: four kids at home…
Pine Barrens by Billy Middleton
“The 2024 election will be all about Taiwan,” our boyfriend, Jeremy, says. We’ve turned off all the lights except the one over the stove in the attached kitchen, and now we’re getting high on the plaid sofa in the…
Night Air by Willa Zhang
One night in college, my roommate Anna and I walked home together from the bus stop. We’d gone downtown to watch a movie, which turned out to be pretty good, and then eaten at a taco truck, which turned…
Ugly by Leesa Fenderson
Ugly, ain’t it? The whole fuck of it. The way the doctor’s fingers patted the rim of skin on Mummy’s concave chest. The twin rims where she, Doctor Small Tits, had cut off Mummy’s two breasts, golden brown to…
Just the Thing For a Day Like This by Cyn Nooney
Marshall is in his office, and he says to please get the wretched dogs to stop barking. He’s preparing for a call, an important call. It’s hot, above ninety, margarita-with-salt weather but I’m nursing so you know what that…
Ariel by Jinwoo Chong
At nine years old you pin him to the soil, knees around ribs, center your two fingers together between his eyes and shout bang, bang, you’re dead, you’re fucking dead. He is writhing, trying to escape you; your sounds…