The Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest, sponsored by Winning Writers and co-sponsored by Duotrope, will award $3,000 for the best story and $3,000 for the best essay, and the top 12 entries will be published online. For this contest, a story is any short work of fiction, and an essay is any short work of nonfiction. Submit published or unpublished work. Fee: $20 per entry. See past winning entries and learn more.

Contest judge Mina Manchester is an Editor-at-large at Five South and former Assistant Editor for Narrative Magazine. She is currently an MFA candidate at the Sewanee School of Letters. Her work has appeared in HuffPost, Columbia Journal, The Normal School, Inscape, and elsewhere. She is a Pinch Literary Award Finalist, Cutthroat Journal Rick DeMarinis Short Story Award Finalist, and UCLA James Kirkwood Price in Creative Writing nominee. Mina is a workshop recipient at Kenyon Review Writing Workshop, The Writer's Hotel where she was a TA in 2020 and 2021, and Narrative Magazine's The Art of the Story. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.