Publishing and Cash Prize Opportunity from the Missouri Review

The Missouri Review's 29th Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize competition is now open for submissions in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. First-place winners in each category receive $5000, feature publication in our spring issue, and are honored at a gala reading and reception in Columbia, Missouri. Contest finalists are often published in the magazine also, or, in the case of poetry, as part of our Poem of the Week online feature. All entrants are considered for publication.

This opportunity is open to writers at all levels. We pride ourselves on focusing on the quality of the writing first and foremost—our allegiance is to finding and supporting strong work. Past winners have ranged from established writers with long records of publication to beginning writers who have never published before. In fact, for our fiction prize winner in 2018, the prizewinning story was her first published piece. 

We accept submissions online or by mail. The postmark deadline is October 1. Winners will be announced in January of 2020.

You can find out more about the contest through our website: https://www.missourireview.com/contests/jeffrey-e-smith-editors-prize/.

This year we are offering two contest entry options. At the standard level ($25 to enter), entrants receive a year-long digital subscription to the Missouri Review ($24 value) as well as the third offering from TMR Books, Jason Brown’s collection of linked stories, A Faithful but Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed ($14.95 value). At the all-access level ($30 to enter), entrants receive the same year-long digital subscription and Brown’s collection, plus full access to our entire ten-year archive of value-added digital issues, complete with print and audio versions of the magazine.