Open to published and unpublished authors over the age of 18 who have not received The Porch Prize in a previous year. The manuscript entered must be the author’s original work and be unpublished and uncontracted at the time of deadline and unpublished during the contest judging time itself. If you submit an entry that is accepted for publication prior to our announcement of the winners, please contact us to withdraw the entry.
Categories & judges
Fiction, judged by Maurice Carlos Ruffin – Manuscripts can be a short story, flash fiction, or excerpt from a longer fiction work. Maximum 8,000 words.
Creative Nonfiction, judged by John T. Edge – Manuscripts can be personal essay or memoir. Maximum 8,000 words.
Poetry, judged by Cecily Parks – One poem per entry.
John T. Edge, author of House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home, writes and hosts the television show TrueSouth and serves Garden & Gun as a columnist. His previous books include The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South. Edge teaches narrative nonfiction in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Georgia. At the University of Mississippi, he directs the Mississippi Lab, where he leads development of Greenfield Farm Writers Residency, and serves as writer-in-residence for the Department of Writing and Rhetoric. Edge lives in Oxford with his wife, the artist Blair Hobbs.
Cecily Parks is the author of three poetry collections, including The Seeds, which will be published by Alice James Books in October 2025. The recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, she is the guest editor of Best New Poets 2025 and editor of the anthology The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses. Her poems appear in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Nation, The New Republic, several editions of The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. She teaches in the MFA Program at Texas State University and lives in Austin.
