Submission Guidelines

Please note that Sarabande Books does not accept electronic submissions.

Sarabande Books holds two national contests: The Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, judged by well-established writers.

For 2008, the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry will be judged by Lynn Emanuel and the Mary McCarthy Prize in Fiction will be judged by Andrea Barrett.

Announcing our 2008 Katherine A. Morton Prize winner: Karyna McGlynn for her manuscript I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl

Honorable mentions:

The Cold War, by Kathleen Ossip
Stories That Listen, by Priscilla Becker
The Noisy Lostness, by Herman Beavers

The winner of the 2008 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction is Jerry Gabriel's Drowned Boy: Stories. Andrea Barrett chose one runner-up: Norma Rosen's The Lovemaking of IB Singer.

Finalists for the McCarthy Prize included: Valerie Hurley, Steven 'Rudy' Wilson, and Lynn Kilpatrick.

For guidelines and a required entry form, please send a business sized, self-addressed, stamped envelope, or download from this site:

The Kathyrn A. Morton Prize in Poetry
The Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction
Required Entry Form

Open Submissions

Please note: we do not return manuscripts, so do not send originals. Open submission season is during the month of September only (for writers of creative nonfiction, please skip to the next paragraph). We ask that writers query first with a sample of 10 poems, a single story, or a section of a novella, or short novel postmarked in September. Response time is under three months. A self-addressed, stamped envelope for reply is required. After this preliminary reading, we may invite writers to submit an entire manuscript.

For writers of creative nonfiction, our open submissions are year-round. All queries should contain a cover letter and writing sample (a single story, chapter or short section), along with a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

Sarabande Books publishes complete manuscripts of poetry of 48 pages minimum. We also publish collections of short stories, novellas, short novels, literary nonficton or essay collections that fall between 150—250 pages. We do not consider longer novels, mysteries, westerns, children's books, adventure, historial fiction or nonfiction, or science fiction, nor do we publish single poems or stories. As we publish many finalists and semi-finalists from our literary contests, most of our new acquisitions come through our contests.