The Tusculum Review 2025 Fiction Chapbook Prize | Jaime Cortez

The Tusculum Review 2025 Fiction Chapbook Prize

• A prize of $1,500
• Publication of the story in the Tusculum Review’s 21st volume (2025)
• Creation of a limited edition stand-alone chapbook with original art

The entry fee is $20 per manuscript. Entry fees include a one-year subscription to the Tusculum Review (an annual publication) and consideration for publication in our 21st volume (2025). We encourage international submissions but must charge an additional $15 fee to mail the journal to locations outside the U.S.

The deadline for submitting is June 15, 2025. All entries should be sent through Submittable: tusculumreview.submittable.com. We do not accept mailed or emailed submissions, but if Submittable is a hardship, let us know at review@tusculum.edu.

Each manuscript should consist of a single story in a standard 12-point font. Stories may be between 2,000 words (about 7 manuscript pages) and 7,000 words (22 pages).

Stories may not have been previously published nor be forthcoming. You are welcome to submit your story to other publications or contests while we consider it for the prize, but please alert us if your story is going to be published or honored elsewhere, so we can take it out of the running. If you have more than one story to submit, create a new entry for each.

Please do NOT include your name or any other identifying information on any page of the story manuscript.

Contest judge Jaime Cortez and editors of the Tusculum Review will determine the winner of the 2025 prize. Family, friends, and previous students of the contest judge and the Tusculum Review editors are disqualified from the competition, as are those with reciprocal professional relationships. Previous winners of Tusculum Review contests are also disqualified. Previous finalists and honorable mentions may enter.

Names and identifying information will not be visible to the judges. The Tusculum Review reserves the right to extend the call for manuscripts or cancel the award. We have only canceled one of the 30+ contests we’ve hosted, due to single-digit entries. We look forward to reading your work.

Chapbooks are short books of literature, appealingly packaged: an art and literary form. Although literary presses most often publish chapbooks of poetry, theTusculum Review publishes essay, short story, and play chapbooks as well. Our annual chapbook contest rotates through the genres on a four-year cycle. This year, 2025, we are selecting a story to publish in chapbook form. We commission a well-matched artist to illustrate the winning story and design a chapbook whose aesthetics augment the story's impact. Past chapbooks can be viewed on our website.

Contest judge Jaime Cortez is a California writer and artist based in Watsonville and the SF Bay Area. His writing and drawings have appeared in Kindergarten: Experimental Writing For Children (Black Radish Press), No Straight Lines (Fantagraphics), Street Art San Francisco (Abrams Press), and Infinite Cities (UC Berkeley Press). He wrote and illustrated the graphic novel Sexile for AIDS Project Los Angeles. His debut short story collection, Gordo, was published in 2021 by Black Cat, an imprint of Grove Atlantic. Gordo received national acclaim from the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. It was nominated for the Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Fiction and the Lambda Literary Award for fiction, and was named a best book of the year by National Public Radio and Bookpage. Cortez received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and his MFA from UC Berkeley. Jaime’s website is www.jaimecortez.org.