The AWP Award Series is an annual competition for the publication of excellent new book-length works. The prizes are supported by the AWP Award Series Endowments. The competition is open to all authors writing in English, regardless of nationality or residence, and is available to published and unpublished authors alike. The winner of the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction receives $5,500 and publication by Mad Creek Books.

The 2025 judge is Kevin Wilson. Kevin Wilson is the author of two collections—Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009), which received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award, and Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine (Ecco, 2018)—and four novels, including Nothing to See Here (Ecco, 2019), a New York Times bestseller and a Read with Jenna book club selection. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, One Story, A Public Space, and elsewhere, and has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2020 and The Best American Short Stories 2021, as well as The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his sons, Griff and Patch, where he is an associate professor in the English Department at Sewanee: The University of the South.

Next submission window: January 1st-February 28, 2025

• Submit via AWP's online submission system


• Only book-length manuscripts are eligible. The AWP Award Series defines “book-length” as follows: 
  • short story collection or creative nonfiction: 150–300 manuscript pages


• Poems, stories, and essays previously published in periodicals are eligible for inclusion in submissions, but manuscripts previously published in their entirety, including self-published manuscripts, are not eligible. As the series is judged anonymously, no list of acknowledgments should accompany your manuscript.


• The AWP Award Series is open to all authors writing original works primarily in English for adult readers. Mixed-genre manuscripts cannot be accepted. Criticism and scholarly monographs are not acceptable for creative nonfiction, which the AWP Award Series defines as factual and literary writing that has the narrative, dramatic, meditative, and lyrical elements of novels, plays, poetry, and memoir.


• To avoid conflicts of interest, friends and former students of a judge (former students who studied with a judge in an academic degree-conferring program or its equivalent) are ineligible to enter the competition in the genre for which their former teacher is serving as judge.


• Current staff of AWP and members of the AWP Board of Directors may not enter the AWP Award Series, and previous staff and board members may not enter for a minimum of three years after leaving AWP or rotating off the board, respectively.


• AWP makes every effort to vary the judges by region, aesthetic, and institution so that writers, if ineligible one year, will certainly be eligible other years. If contestants win in any genre, they may not enter the competition again in the same genre for the next five consecutive years.

GRACE PALEY PRIZE WINNERS