April 1 to June 1, 2026
Jessica Treadway has published four novels and four story collections, including I Felt My Life
With Both My Hands, published in April 2026. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, and her collection Please Come Back to Me received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. She is a longtime faculty member at Emerson College in Boston.
Sven Birkerts is the author of numerous books of essay and memoir, most recently The Miro Worm and the Mysteries of Writing
Porsha Olayiwola is a native of Chicago who writes, lives and loves in Boston. Olayiwola is a writer, performer, educator and curator who uses afro-futurism and surrealism to examine historical and current issues in the Black, woman, and queer diasporas. She is an Individual World Poetry Slam Champion and the founder of the Roxbury Poetry Festival. Olayiwola is Brown University’s 2019 Heimark Artist -In -Residence as well as the 2021 Artist-in-Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She is a 2020 poet laureate fellow with the Academy of American poets. Olayiwola earned her MFA in poetry from Emerson College and is the author of i shimmer sometimes, too. Olayiwola is the current poet laureate for the city of Boston. Her work can be found in or forthcoming from with TriQuarterly Magazine, Black Warrior Review, The Boston Globe, Essence Magazine, Redivider, The Academy of American Poets, Netflix, Wildness Press, The Museum of Fine Arts and elsewhere.
John Vasquez Mejias is an artist/printmaker living in the Bronx, NYC. He is the creator of The Puerto Rican War, published by Union & Co. (Barnes and Noble), which tells the story of Puerto Rican revolutionaries fighting USA colonialism in 1950. John has exhibited and performed at venues such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Poster House, NYPL Main, and many others. His next book, Lolita Lebrón -Puerto Rican Revolutionary, will be released in the fall from Fantagraphics Press
Cover sheet required with name, address, telephone number and email. Email and/or phone MUST be included to be considered. Please include the cover sheet in the same file as the actual submission. Do not put your name on the manuscript itself. Final judges will be choosing on the basis of the quality of your work. Please indicate the genre of your piece next to the title.
Each entry: Fiction or Nonfiction: 25-page maximum, double-spaced, 12-point font, .DOC or .DOCX attachment; free-standing excerpts from books also accepted. Poetry: 3-poem maximum, 12-point font, .DOC or .DOCX attachment. Graphic Lit: Original artwork, multiple panels (no single image pieces), 1-6 pages preferred, maximum 8-10 pages, in JPG/PDF format.
You may submit more than once during the contest period but must pay a separate fee for each entry.
You may submit simultaneously elsewhere, but please contact us immediately if accepted by another journal.
We will not accept previously published work. Solstice has first publication rights, but copyright reverts to you upon publication. After the piece is published in our Summer Awards Issue, we will publish the piece in our Archives. All winners, finalists, and editors’ choice will be cited in future advertisements and announcements.
Solstice has a zero tolerance policy for AI generated submissions of any genre. Any individuals found to be submitting AI generated work will have that work rejected. Any reading fees sent to Solstice will not be refunded on the basis of rejection.
If you won last year’s contest, you must skip a year before resubmitting to the contest, but we encourage you to submit work to Solstice for general publication.
We will announce the winners, finalists, and editors’ choice approximately 6-8 weeks after the contest deadline.
After announcing the winners, finalists, and editors’ choice, all contest submissions will be automatically considered for standard publication unless you indicate otherwise.
The $20.00 entry fee must be paid online at the time of entry.
We accept online submissions only through Submittable. No emails please.
