We’re pleased to announce the fifth annual Larry Brown Short Story Award. The winners will receive the following prizes: 1st $500 USD, 2nd $50 USD, 3rd $50 USD, and 4th and 5th will receive a copy of the book Tiny Love: The Complete Stories by Larry Brown. Each prize winner will be published in the January 2021 issue of Pithead Chapel.
2020 Guest Judge: Jill McCorkle
Contest Guidelines
Please read the guidelines carefully before submitting
- The contest is open from August 1st to October 31st of each year
- The submitted story must be less than 4,000 words
- No previously published work will be considered
- The writer’s name and contact information should only appear within the cover letter box in Submittable; submissions will be judged blindly by our guest judge
- Again, no identifying information should appear on the submitted manuscript pages
- There’s a $10 entry fee for each story submission
- Writers can submit multiple entries; however, each entry must be submitted separately and each entry requires an entry fee and cover letter with an address and phone number
- Simultaneous submissions are fine; however, please withdraw the story immediately if it’s accepted elsewhere
- The winners and honorable mentions will be notified by December 15th, 2020, and the prize money will be awarded the day after publication on January 2nd, 2021
- Those selected as honorable mentions will have the chance to be published alongside the winning selections in the January 2021 issue of Pithead Chapel
2020 Guest Judge: Jill McCorkle
Jill McCorkle has the distinction of having her first two novels published on the same day in 1984. Of these novels, The New York Times Book Review said, “One suspects the author of The Cheer Leader is a born novelist, with July 7th, she is also a full grown one.” Since then she has published four other novels—her latest, Hieroglyphics coming July 2020—and four collections of short stories.
Five of her books have been named New York Times notable books. McCorkle has received the New England Booksellers Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature and the North Carolina Award for Literature. She is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
Four of her stories have been tabbed for Best American Short Stories and several have been collected in New Stories from the South. Her short stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Oxford American, The Southern Review, Narrative Magazine and The American Scholar among others. Her story “Intervention” is included in the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. An essay, “Cuss Time,” originally published in The American Scholar was selected for Best American Essays. Other essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Garden and Gun, Southern Living, Our State, Allure and Real Simple.
McCorkle has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, Tufts, and Brandeis where she was the Fannie Hurst Visiting Writer. She was a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard for five years where she also chaired Creative Writing. She currently teaches creative writing in the MFA Program at NC State University and is a core faculty member of the Bennington College Writing Seminars. She is a frequent instructor in the Sewanee Summer Writers Program .
She lives with her husband, photographer Tom Rankin, in Hillsborough, NC.
Read “Cuss Time” and “Me and Big Foot” on The American Scholar website.
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