2022 Columbia Journal Print Contest – Submissions Open from December 15 to December 31, 2022

The Columbia Journal is delighted to announce that the 2022 Print Contest will accept submissions in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translation from December 15 through December 31, 2022. Our judges this year are Jonathan Escoffery (fiction), Qian Julie Wang (nonfiction), Diana Khoi Nguyen (poetry), and Valzhyna Mort (translation).

The four first place winners of the Print Contest will be published in print in Columbia Journal’s 61st issue in the summer of 2023 and will receive a $400 cash prize each. At least two additional finalists will be selected and announced for each genre.

Starting December 15, all entries will be accepted via Submittable for a $15 fee per submission. The deadline to submit is December 31, 2022.

DATES:

Our submission window will be open from December 15 to December 31, 2022.

FEES:

Entry to the 2022 Print Contest will be accepted via Submittable and requires a $15 entry fee, which helps subsidize the contest and our magazine at large.

COMPLETE GUIDELINES:

The four winning artists will receive $400 and have their work published in Columbia Journal’s 61st issue, to be released in the summer of 2023. Some finalists may also be published in the issue or online.

Multiple submissions are welcome, but note that the entry fee applies to each submission.

Fiction and nonfiction submissions must not exceed 5,000 words. Poetry submissions must not exceed 5 pages, and must not exceed three poems.

The contest entrant’s name should not appear anywhere on the submitted file. In addition, because we share files electronically, it is the entrant’s responsibility to ensure other identifying notations, including references in the document’s properties and title, are not present.

Contest finalists are blind judged to select prize winners.

All work must be submitted through Submittable. We will not accept mailed or emailed submissions.

All work must be original and previously unpublished in any form.

Simultaneous submissions are allowed, but please inform us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.

Submissions may not be modified after entry. The Columbia Journal, however, reserves the right to suggest edits to the winning story as well as to finalists’ and semi-finalists’ work that they are interested in publishing.

Contest entrants cannot have studied or taught at the Columbia University Writing Program at any time in the past three years.

If you have questions, please email us at publisher.columbia@gmail.com.

ABOUT OUR JUDGES:

FICTION: Jonathan Escoffery

Jonathan Escoffery’s debut story collection, If I Survive You, which was long-listed for the National Book Award and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, and is a finalist for the Southern Book Prize and a Golden Poppy Award. Jonathan also is the winner of The Paris Review’s 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction and is the recipient of a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts (Prose) Literature Fellowship. His stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Oprah Daily, Electric Literature, Zyzzyva, AGNI, Pleiades, American Short Fiction, Prairie Schooner, Passages North, and elsewhere. Jonathan has taught creative writing and seminars on the writer’s life at Stanford University, the University of Minnesota, the Center for Fiction, Tin House, The Work Room, The Porch, and at GrubStreet in Boston. He is a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s Creative Writing MFA Program (Fiction) and attends the University of Southern California’s Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature Program as a Provost Fellow. He is a 2021-2023 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

NONFICTION: Qian Julie Wang

Qian Julie Wang is The New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Country and a civil rights litigator. A graduate of Yale Law School and Swarthmore College, Qian Julie is managing partner of Gottlieb & Wang LLP, a firm dedicated to advancing education, disability, and civil rights on behalf of marginalized communities. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, and The Cut, and she has appeared on the TODAY Show, MSNBC, and NPR. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their two rescue dogs, Salty and Peppers.

POETRY: Diana Khoi Nguyen

A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (2018) and recipient of a 2021 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to winning the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Colorado Book Award, she was also a finalist for the National Book Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A Kundiman fellow, she is core faculty in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh. In the spring of 2022, she was an artist-in-residence at Brown University.

TRANSLATION: Valzhyna Mort

Valzhyna Mort is a poet and translator born in Minsk, Belarus. She is the author of three poetry collections, Factory of Tears (2008), Collected Body (2011) and, most recently, Music for the Dead and Resurrected (2020), named one of the best poetry book of 2020 by the New York Times and NPR, and the winner of the 2020 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2022 UNT Rilke Prize. Mort is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the Lannan Foundation, and the Amy Clampitt Foundation. Her essays and poetry have appeared in The Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Financial Times, Poetry, Poetry Review, Granta, The White Review, The Baffler, and many more. Mort teaches at Cornell University and writes in English and Belarusian. She translates between English, Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish. She has received the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation and the National Endowment for the Arts grant in translation for her work on Polina Barskova’s book of selected poems, Air Raid (2021). Valzhyna Mort’s Belarusian books are Я тоненькая як твае вейкі (2005), Эпідэмія Ружаў (2017), and Песні Для Мёртвых і Ўваскрэслых (2022).