It’s summertime, but the livin’ isn’t easy. Between the cost of groceries, gas, and housing, it’s expensive to live—and even more expensive to fall behind. We’re seeking fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry about paychecks, debt, and how we make ends meet when the means just aren’t there. Write about what happens when money—the pursuit of it, the lack of it—drives people toward decisions they wouldn’t normally make. In times of need, how do friends and neighbors come together … or tear each other apart?
We’re open to flash prose and poetry that questions how people afford to live, what they do to survive, and what it looks like when “having enough” is just out of reach. We’re particularly interested in work that bends genres or uses unexpected forms to explore this theme. Some angles to consider are receipts and missed payments, dine-and-dashing, community kitchens, and the crushing weight of debt. When the bill is due, what happens when you can’t pay it?
We welcome writing of all forms: flash fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and hybrid work. Three winners will be selected and published at the end of August.
We are now offering editorial commentary on submissions. For an additional fee, you’ll receive two feedback notes from our experienced editors or readers. To learn more and submit, head to Duosuma.
Prizes:
- First place: $1,000 and publication
- Second place: $200 and publication
- Third place: $100 and publication
Another armed conflict. Another shooting. The same rhetoric, displacement, and senselessness. If it all feels familiar, it’s because it is. We’re seeking writing about cycles of destruction—how they begin, how they’re justified, and how they keep recurring.
Send us your writing about patterns of conflict at any scale: personal, interpersonal, or global. We’re particularly interested in prose and poetry that plays with time and recurrence, including (but not limited to!) microessays that explore false memory, poetry that interrogates the art of repetition, and short stories that fracture time.
George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” What happens when the cycle breaks?
We welcome writing of all forms: fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and hybrid work.
Three winners will be selected and published at the end of June.
We are now offering editorial commentary on submissions. For an additional fee, you’ll receive two feedback notes from our experienced editors or readers. To learn more and submit, head to Duosuma.
Prizes:
- First place: $1,000 and publication
- Second place: $200 and publication
- Third place: $100 and publication
In theory, transparency and accountability protect the public. In practice, information is often shaped, cropped, obscured. Lies are presented as evidence without question. Powerful people are implicated in horrific crimes, and then show up to work the next day. What happens when redaction becomes a tool of power?
Write about cover-ups: governmental, institutional, personal. Send us your fiction, poems, and creative nonfiction about what gets hidden. About survivors whose names surface while abusers walk free. About secrecy as strategy, incompetence as weapon, and silence as intimidation. We’re seeking writing that interrogates erasure, exposure, and the dangerous space between truth and what we’re allowed to see. When the black marker moves across the page, who does it protect?
We welcome writing of all forms: fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and hybrid work. Erasure pieces are welcome, as long as the source text is under two pages. Please include the source material in your submission.
Three winners will be selected and published at the end of April.
Prizes:
- First place: $1,000 and publication
- Second place: $200 and publication
- Third place: $100 and publication
This challenge is now closed. Thank you to those who submitted! If you missed this call, please add our next challenge to your calendar. It opens November 1.
Our winners are:
First place: “Garry Learnt How to Be a Man Off the Internet” by Rhys L’Hermite
Second place: “Feed” by Celeste Amidon
Third place: “Aswangs Wear Barong Tagalog” by Tresia Traqueña
You can read their pieces on our website beginning November 24!
The scariest monsters aren’t hiding under the bed. They’re the ones we made ourselves. Write about the monsters of our own making and how they haunt us today, whether that’s AI and tech, structural violence, climate collapse, or something just as insidious.
We are not looking for ghost stories or urban legends. Instead, send us writing that responds to what you doomscroll through. We’re seeking recipes for social justice, prose that explores the perils of smartphone addiction, poems about inflammatory rhetoric and the platforms they build, survival tips for the singularity, and more. Show us what “monsters of our own making” means to you.
We welcome all forms: fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, hybrid, or something even genre goblins can’t categorize. If it’s urgent, sharp, and dripping with weird, we want to read it.
Send us your words that are as alive and unruly as the moment. Three winners will be selected and published at the end of November.
Prizes:
- First place: $1,000 and publication
- Second place: $200 and publication
- Third place: $100 and publication
