The 2024 Gulf Coast Prizes
We are now accepting entries for the 2024 Gulf Coast Prizes in Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry.
SUBMISISONS OPEN: February 14-April 10
Judges: Zaina Arafat (Fiction), Edgar Gomez (Nonfiction), Monica Youn (Poetry)
Entries for the Gulf Coast Prizes in Fiction and Nonfiction should be a single prose work not exceeding 7,000 words. Entrants for the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry may submit up to five poems not exceeding 10 total pages in length. We only accept submissions via Submittable. Entrants may submit more than once or in more than one genre, but each new entry must be accompanied by a separate $26 entry fee.
Contest Guidelines
- Click here for online submissions accepted via Gulf Coast’s Submittable
- Submit your work as a single .doc, .docx, or .pdf file.
- Only previously unpublished work will be considered.
- The contest will be judged blindly, so please do not include your cover letter, your name, or any contact information in the uploaded document. This information should only be pasted in the “Comments” field in Submittable.
- Submittable accepts all major credit cards for the $26 entry fee, which includes a one-year subscription to Gulf Coast.
Entries for Gulf Coast Prizes in Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry are accepted annually between February 14 and April 10. The contest awards $1,500 and publication in Gulf Coast to the winner in each genre. Two honorable mentions in each genre are awarded $250. All entries are considered for publication and the entry fee includes a one-year subscription to Gulf Coast.
Zaina Arafat
Zaina Arafat is a Palestinian-American writer and the author of You Exist Too Much, which won a 2021 Lambda Literary Award and was named Roxane Gay's favorite book of the year. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, The Believer, Granta, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic and elsewhere. She's previously been awarded the Arab Women/Migrants from the Middle East Fellowship from Jack Jones Literary Arts and named a Champion of Pride by The Advocate. She teaches at Barnard College and lives in Brooklyn.
Monica Youn
Monica Youn is the author of four poetry collections, most recently FROM FROM, which was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award. She has been awarded the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and a Stegner Fellowship. Her previous books have been shortlisted for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award. A former constitutional lawyer, she is a member of the curatorial collective the Racial Imaginary Institute and is an associate professor of English at UC Irvine.
Edgar Gomez
Edgar Gomez (all pronouns) is a Florida-born writer with roots in Nicaragua and Puerto Rico. A graduate of University of California, Riverside’s MFA program, his words have appeared in The LA Times, Poets & Writers, Lithub, The Rumpus, and beyond. His debut memoir, High-Risk Homosexual, received the 2023 American Book Award, a Stonewall Israel-Fishman Nonfiction Book Honor Award, and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir. Gomez’s second book, a darkly-comic memoir about growing up poor in early 2000’s Florida titled Alligator Tears, will be out in 2025 from Crown. His work has been supported by The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Black Mountain Institute. He lives between New York and Puerto Rico.