In 1986, Jerome Stern, the then-director of Florida State University’s creative writing program, founded this contest to celebrate micro fiction. Submissions had to be under 250 words, and the winner received a crate of oranges as well as a check. Stern passed away from cancer in 1996, and though the guidelines and prize have changed since, we continue holding the contest in Stern’s memory, with a modern master of the short-short story judging the entries annually.

Please send up to three short-short stories per submission. Each short-short should be no more than 500 words. Do not include personal identification information within your submissions. 

We're thrilled to have Venita Blackburn serving as this year's judge. Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in the NYTimes, New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Story Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Paris Review, and others. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship in 2014 and several Pushcart prize nominations. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize for fiction, which resulted in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017. In 2018 she earned a place as a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions award among others. Blackburn’s second collection of stories is How to Wrestle a Girl, 2021, finalist for a Lambda Literary Prize and was a NYTimes editor’s choice. Her debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, published January of 2024 and is about the mania of grief, all of human history and a lesbian assassin at the end of the world. She is the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities of color: livewriteworkshop.com. Her home town is Compton, California, and she is an Associate Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.

The winner will receive $750, and winners and finalists will be notified in Spring 2025 and published in our biannual issue in Fall 2025. Read more about the contest and judge here.

Only withdraw your entire submission if none of your submitted short-shorts remain available. To withdraw a single short-short, please add a note to your submission with the title you would like to remove from consideration. (Please notify us via Submittable only.)

While you're here, check out our upcoming virtual workshops and classes!

Our nonfiction contest was established in honor of Dr. Ned Stuckey-French, whose legacy will last as one of service to the literary community, his students, hospital workers’ unions, and beyond. His spirit of selfless service is a model we aspire to, and his unflinching dedication to truth and its telling inspires the nonfiction we publish and produce.

We seek submissions in this vein: nonfiction that prods and pressures expectations; that speaks to the personal against the powerful; and that prioritizes soul, heart, and service. Please send essays up to 10 pages. Do not include personal identification information within your submissions.

We're thrilled to have Shze-Hui Tjoa serving as this year's judge. Shze-Hui Tjoa is a Singaporean writer living in the UK. She is the author of THE STORY GAME: A MEMOIR (Tin House Books, 2024), named one of the best books of Summer 2024 by The Boston Globe. She has writing and interviews in, or forthcoming in, BOMB Magazine, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, The Millions, Poets & Writers, Between the Covers podcast, and elsewhere. She has received career support from global arts organizations including Green Olive Arts, Disquiet International, and AWP's Writer-to-Writer Mentorship Program.

The winner will receive $750, and winners and finalists will be notified in Spring 2025 and published in our biannual issue in Fall 2025.  Read more about the contest and judge here.

While you're here, check out our upcoming virtual workshops and classes! 

Our poetry contest began in 1996 to honor Michael Wm. Gearhart, a Ph.D. student in creative writing at Florida State University who died suddenly at the age of 39 as he was completing the final steps of his degree. The contest continues today in his memory.

Please send up to three poems, no more than 10 pages total. Include no more than one poem per page. Do not include personal identification information within your submissions.

We're thrilled to have Karyna McGlynn serving as this year's judge. Karyna McGlynn is a writer, educator, and visual artist. She is the Director of Creative Writing at Interlochen Center for the Arts, and was the 2023-2024 Visiting Distinguished Professor of Poetry in the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan. She is the author of three poetry collections from Sarabande Books, including 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse, which was a 2023 Lambda Literary finalist, and Hothouse, which was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Karyna received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan, and her PhD in Creative Writing & Literature from University of Houston. Her writing has appeared in Poetry, Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, New England Review, and Kenyon Review. 

The winner will receive $750, and winners and finalists will be notified in Spring 2025 and published in our biannual issue in Fall 2025. Read more about the contest and judge here. 

Only withdraw your entire submission if none of your submitted poems remain available. To withdraw a single poem, please add a note to your submission with the title you would like to remove from consideration. (Please notify us via Submittable only.)

While you're here, check out our upcoming virtual workshops and classes!

2020 was the inaugural year of our art contest, and we are thrilled to continue it in tandem with our journal’s goal of drawing attention to and supporting the work of a wide variety of artists and art forms. 

We welcome art submissions in all art genres: drawing, painting, illustration, photography, comics, video art, and so on—if you can name it, we’re interested. Artists should send in a portfolio of 8 of their best works and include a list of titles, dates, materials, and dimensions. These works can be previously advertised or published in other journals or previously exhibited in galleries. Do not include personal identification information within your submissions. 

We're thrilled to have Michelle Sakhai serving as this year's judge. Michelle Sakhai is a contemporary artist who specializes in metal leaf oil paintings. Born in New York, Sakhai began painting at an early age. Her mixed heritage has shaped her as an artist. With both Persian and Japanese roots, her art derives influences from both cultures. Family trips to Japan initially exposed her to metal leaf and inspired her to become a pioneer in this medium. 

Sakhai’s paintings are exhibited in galleries around the world including Tokyo, Ibiza, Miami, Carmel-By-The-Sea, Berkshires, Dallas, and New York City. Her art remains in both private and public collections including the Montefiore Einstein Medical Center, The Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, and Kamakura Park in Japan. Sakhai's work has been exhibited in Universities including Stanford, Michigan Medicine, The Academy of Art, Hofstra, and Mary Hardin-Baylor. She recently published her first book titled Awakening’, a compilation of 200 of her paintings. 

The winner will receive $750, and winners and finalists will be notified in Spring 2025 and published in our biannual issue in Fall 2025 or online. Read more about the contest and judge here.

While you're here, check out our upcoming virtual workshops and classes!

You don’t have to be young to read or write YA. It is a category of fiction that currently attracts readers from every demographic. The Southeast Review is interested in YA as well, so we will now be accepting Young Adult fiction submissions. These submissions will be capped at 100.

YA is about more than just having a teenage protagonist. The work needs to take on the perspective of a young adult, not a grown person looking back on their teen experiences. If you think your story fits this category, we can’t wait to read it.

Please submit one double-spaced short story of up to 4000 words. 

We rarely publish short-shorts outside of our World’s Best Short-Short Story Contest. If you do plan to submit short-shorts, however, please send no more than five per submission. We don’t publish novellas and will only consider novel excerpts if they work as stand-alone stories.

P.S. For the category, we are open to any genre, so long as it fits under the YA umbrella.

While you're here, check out our upcoming virtual workshops and classes!

We are offering free general submissions for writers who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.
 

You don’t have to be young to read or write YA. It is a category of fiction that currently attracts readers from every demographic. The Southeast Review is interested in YA as well, so we will now be accepting Young Adult fiction submissions. These submissions will be capped at 100.

YA is about more than just having a teenage protagonist. The work needs to take on the perspective of a young adult, not a grown person looking back on their teen experiences. If you think your story fits this category, we can’t wait to read it.

Please submit one double-spaced short story of up to 4000 words. 

We rarely publish short-shorts outside of our World’s Best Short-Short Story Contest. If you do plan to submit short-shorts, however, please send no more than five per submission. We don’t publish novellas and will only consider novel excerpts if they work as stand-alone stories.

P.S. For the category, we are open to any genre, so long as it fits under the YA umbrella.

While you're here, check out our upcoming virtual workshops and classes!

We are offering free general submissions for writers who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Please note that these submissions do have a cap, in the event that we receive more free submissions than Submittable allows us to offer. 

 Please submit no more than 5 single-spaced poems at a time, with a maximum of 15  pages per total submission. Place all poems in one document. 

Only withdraw your entire submission if none of your submitted poems remain available. To withdraw a single poem, please add a note to your submission with the title you would like to remove from consideration. (Please notify us via Submittable only, not email.)

While you're here, check out our upcoming virtual workshops and classes!

We are offering free general submissions for writers who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Please note that these submissions do have a cap, in the event that we receive more free submissions than Submittable allows us to offer.

Please submit one double-spaced creative nonfiction piece of up to 5000  words. 

We’re open to a variety of forms, including memoir, travel writing, and personal essay. We don’t, however, publish academic writing.

While you're here, check out our upcoming virtual workshops and classes!

We are offering free general submissions for writers who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Please note that these submissions do have a cap, in the event that we receive more free submissions than Submittable allows us to offer.
 

Please submit one double-spaced short story of up to 7500 words.
 

We rarely publish short-shorts outside of our World’s Best Short-Short Story Contest. If you do plan to submit short-shorts, however, please send no more than five per submission. We don’t publish novellas and will only consider novel excerpts if they work as stand-alone stories.

While you're here, check out our upcoming virtual workshops and classes!

General submissions to the Southeast Review are free year-round to persons who are currently or formerly incarcerated; contest fees are also waived. 

If you are submitting on behalf of someone else, please provide your contact information in the fields below, as well as any additional information we might need to contact the person whose work you're submitting. 

Specific guidelines for submissions in any genre can be found on our main page. 

**If you are formerly incarcerated, please include a brief statement in your cover letter regarding how your experience being incarcerated has impacted you.

Note: Should a person who is currently incarcerated wish to submit directly, rather than through a liaison, we accept submissions by mail. Please provide them with the following mailing address: 

Southeast Review 

English Department. Williams Bldg. 

Florida State University 

Tallahassee, FL 32306

While you're here, check out our upcoming virtual workshops and classes!

We’re interested in interviews that balance an intimate portrayal of the writer with their work. Explore the personal, ask about the nonliterary, evoke a mood. Create context for the work under discussion, then give us a sense of how the writer identifies with a particular tradition or is trying to break from it. We encourage making connections with political and historical events so that your conversation opens to broader audiences.

Please send us a complete interview for consideration. We particularly welcome interviewers and writers from historically marginalized groups.

While you're here, check out our upcoming virtual workshops and classes!