Sixth Annual Short Fiction Contest Announced

Kate Osana Simonian

The Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center will sponsor its Sixth Annual Short Story Contest.  This is a state-wide competition open to all undergraduate students currently enrolled in an Arkansas college or university, regardless of major.  The only stipulations are that the submitted material must be an unpublished fictional short story on any subject matter no more than 5000 words in length.  All submissions are due to the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum no later than April 5, 2019.  Winners will be notified by May 3.  They will receive a free spot in this June’s Writers’ Retreat and will be invited to give a public reading at the museum.

This year’s contest will be judged by Kate Osana Simonian.  Kate is an Armenian-Australian novelist, essayist, and short story writer. She hails from Sydney, but is completing her English PhD at Texas Tech, where she is a Presidential Fellow. Her work has been published by, or is forthcoming in, The Iowa Review, The Michigan Quarterly, Ninth Letter, Shenandoah, The Chicago Tribune, and The Best Australian Stories. In 2017, she won the Nelson Algren Award, and her honors include a Tenneessee Williams scholarship to the Sewanee Writer’s Conference, and a position as the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at the Hemingway-Pfeiffer museum in Arkansas. Kate is an assistant editor for Iron Horse and fiction editor for Vanguard: Graduate Creative Exercises for the Classroom (TTU Press 2019). Ask about her novel-in-stories, Australialand, or check her out at katesimonian.com

Past winners of the contest include Anushah Jiwani of Hendrix College, Mike Smith of Lyon College, Justin Lee Hunsperger of the University of Central Arkansas, Emily Hill of Hendrix College, and Rebecca Prather of Arkansas State University.