AWP Award Series

The competition is open to all authors writing in English regardless of nationality or residence and is available to published and unpublished authors alike. Only book-length manuscripts are eligible. The AWP Award Series defines “book-length” as: Poetry: 48 pages minimum text; Short story collection or creative nonfiction: 150–300 manuscript pages; and Novel: at least 60,000 and no more than 110,000 words. To avoid conflicts of interest, friends and former students of a judge (former students who studied with a judge in an academic degree-conferring program or its equivalent) are ineligible to enter the competition in the genre for which their former teacher is serving as judge. Current staff of AWP and members of AWP’s Board of Directors may not enter the AWP Award Series, and previous staff and Board members may not enter for a minimum of three years after leaving AWP or rotating off the Board, respectively.