The Big Moose Prize - Black Lawrence Press

Each year Black Lawrence Press will award The Big Moose Prize for an unpublished novel. The prize is open to new, emerging, and established writers. The winner of this contest will receive book publication, a $1,000 cash award, and ten copies of the book. Prizes will be awarded on publication.

The Big Moose Prize is open to traditional novels as well as novels-in-stories, novels-in-poems, and other hybrid forms that contain within them the spirit of a novel.

Deadline: January 31 Click Here to Submit Entry Period: December 1 - January 31 Early Bird Entry Period: November 1 - November 30 How to submit ›

How to Submit

Black Lawrence Press accepts submissions and payment of the entry fee ($30) exclusively through our online submission manager, Submittable. We are not able to accept submissions via email or postal mail.

Entries are read blind by senior Black Lawrence Press editors and a rotating panel of former Big Moose Prize winners. Recent members of the judging panel include:

-Tracy DeBrincat, author of Hollywood Buckaroo

–Kevin Fenton, author of Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

–Shena McAuliffe, author of The Good Echo

-Megan McNamer, author of Home Everywhere

-Ron Nyren, author of The Book of Lost Light

-Caroline Patterson, author of The Stone Sister

-Jill Stukenberg, author of News of the Air

All manuscripts should include a title page (listing only the title of the work), and when appropriate, an acknowledgments page and table of contents. Manuscripts should be paginated and formatted in an easy-to-read font such as Garamond or Times New Roman. Manuscripts should be 90-1,000 pages in length, not including front and back matter (table of contents, title page, etc.). Identifying information for the author should not be included anywhere on the manuscript itself. You are welcome to include a brief bio or something about yourself in your cover note on Submittable, which will only be made accessible to the editorial panel after the group of Semi-Finalist and Finalist manuscripts has been chosen.

Manuscripts containing previously published excerpts are absolutely eligible–please simply note previously published work on an acknowledgments page. On the other hand, if your manuscript has been previously published as a whole (including publication with a press, self-publication, online/digital publication, and publication in a small, limited-edition print run), then the manuscript is not eligible.

Simultaneous submissions are acceptable and encouraged, but please notify us by withdrawing your manuscript on Submittable immediately if it is accepted for publication elsewhere.
Multiple submissions (the submission of more than one manuscript to the contest) are permitted.
Collaborative manuscripts are welcome.

Need help with our submissions manager?
Visit http://help.submittable.com

We look forward to reading your work!

Emily Mitchell

2025 Big Moose winner, for Far Ocean, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2027

Emily Mitchell grew up in London, England and moved to the United States as a teenager. She is the author of The Last Summer of the World (W. W. Norton, 2007), a novel, which was a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions Award, and two collections of short fiction: Viral (W. W. Norton, 2015) and The Church of Divine Electricity, winner of the 2023 Elixir Press Fiction Prize. Her stories have appeared in Harpers’, The Sun, The Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, American Short Fiction and elsewhere. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the New Statesman (UK), Guernica and Washington Independent Review of Books. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Can Serrat International Artists Residency. She serves as fiction editor for New England Review and teaches at the University of Maryland. She lives just outside Washington DC with her husband, the writer and editor J. M. Tyree.

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How to Submit

Emily Mitchell

Past Winners

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

The Forest for the Trees

Down Here We Come Up

News of the Air