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
Rules & Guidelines
Winners, finalists, and Editors’ Choice in each genre will be published in our Summer Awards Issue due out in August. All winners, finalists, and editors’ choice will be cited in future advertisements and announcements.
Previous judges have included Andrea Cohen, Martha Collins, Andres Dubus III, Jennifer Haigh, Terrance Hayes, Marjan Kamali, Robert Lopez, Rajiv Mohabir, Celeste Ng, Jerald Walker, and Afaa Weaver.
FEE: The $20.00 entry fee must be paid online at the time of entry.
Cover sheet required with name, address, telephone number and email. Email and/or phone MUST be included to be considered. Please include 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.
12-point font, double-spaced, .DOC or .DOCX attachment. We accept online submissions only through Submittable. No emails please.
Each entry: Fiction or Nonfiction: 25-page maximum, double-spaced; free-standing excerpts from books also accepted. Poetry: 3-poem maximum. 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 but must pay a separate fee for each entry.
You may submit simultaneously elsewhere, but please email us immediately if accepted at another journal.
We will not accept previously published work. Solstice has first publication rights, but copyright reverts to you upon publication. We will publish the piece after the Summer Awards Issue in our Archives.
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.
