2022 Columbia Journal Spring Contest
By Madeleine Cravens
The Columbia Journal is delighted to announce that the 2022 Spring Contest is now officially open for submissions in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translation. Our judges this year are Garielle Lutz (fiction), Colleen Kinder (nonfiction), Natasha Rao (poetry), and Aaron Coleman (translation).
The four first-place winners of the Spring Contest will be published online in April 2022 and will receive a $250 dollar cash prize. At least two additional finalists will be selected and announced for each genre. All submissions will be considered for publication.
From February 14th onwards, all entries will be accepted via Submittable for a $10 fee per submission. The deadline to submit is March 7th, 2022. Submit your work today via Submittable!
FEES AND WAIVERS
Entry to the 2022 Spring Contest between January 31st and February 13th requires no fee. Submissions will be accepted via email at spring.fee.waiver@gmail.com.
Please use the subject line: 2022 Spring Contest-GENRE. (Include the genre of your submission: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or translation)
COMPLETE GUIDELINES
The four winning artists will receive $250 and have their work published online in the Columbia Journal (April 2022). Finalists may also be published.
Multiple submissions are welcome, but note that the entry fee applies to each submission.
Fiction and nonfiction submissions must not exceed 5,000 words. Poetry submissions must not exceed 5 pages. Visual art submissions are limited to no more than 10 images and any written description accompanying a submission must not exceed 500 words.
The contest entrant’s name should not appear anywhere on the submitted file. In addition, because we share files electronically, it is the entrant’s responsibility to ensure other identifying notations, including references in the document’s properties and title, are not present.
Contest finalists are blind judged to select prize winners.
Early Submission entries will be accepted via email and before the deadline (February 13th, 2022, 11:59 p.m. ET). All other work must be submitted through Submittable. We will not accept mailed submissions.
All work must be original and previously unpublished in any form.
Simultaneous submissions are allowed, but please inform us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
Submissions may not be modified after entry. The Columbia Journal, however, reserves the right to suggest edits to the winning story as well as finalists and semi-finalists they are interested in publishing.
Contest entrants cannot have studied or taught at the Columbia University Writing Program at any time in the past three years.
If you have questions, please email us at publisher.columbia@gmail.com
ABOUT OUR JUDGES:
FICTION: Garielle Lutz
Garielle Lutz is the author of eight books, the most recent of which is the short-story collection Worsted (SF/LD, 2021). She is recognized for her darkly comic portrayals of human frailty and innovative prose style. Her essay “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place,” originally delivered as a lecture at Columbia University’s Writing Program and subsequently published in The Believer, is taught in fiction workshops across the country. She is a librarian at Calamari Archive, a collective repository of literature, art, and music.
NONFICTION: Colleen Kinder
Colleen Kinder is an essayist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, National Geographic Traveler, AFAR, Salon.com, Creative Nonfiction, A Public Space, and The Best American Travel Writing. She is the editor of the forthcoming anthology Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us (Algonquin Books, 2022), and the co-founder of the nonprofit magazine Off Assignment. A former Fulbright scholar and MacDowell fellow, Kinder has taught writing at Yale University, the Chautauqua Institution, and Semester at Sea.
POETRY: Natasha Rao
Natasha Rao is a poet and educator from New Jersey. Her debut collection, Latitude, was selected by Ada Limón as the winner of the 2021 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. The recipient of a 2021 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, she has received support from Bread Loaf, the Vermont Studio Center, and elsewhere, and was named a Djanikian Scholar by The Adroit Journal. Her work appears in The Nation, American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. She is currently a managing editor of American Chordata and lives in Brooklyn.
TRANSLATION: Aaron Coleman
Aaron Coleman is the Postdoctoral Fellow in Critical Translation Studies in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. Aaron’s work explores intersections of poetry, translation, and critical comparison in the African Diaspora in the Americas. His first critical book project, Poetics of Afrodiasporic Translation: Negotiating Race, Nation, and Belonging Between Cuba and the United States, investigates translational relationships between Black poets in the United States and AfroCuban poets in order to compare their respective literary traditions and explore the transnational impact of the literary African diaspora in the Americas. Situating his own praxis as a translator and poet in relation to Black US-American poet-translators in the twentieth century (like James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes) undergirds his current translation project with Nicolás Guillén’s 1967 collection, El gran zoo [The Great Zoo]. Aaron earned his MFA in Poetry and PhD in Comparative Literature with a certificate in Translation Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
Coleman is the author of Threat Come Close (Four Way Books, 2018) winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and St. Trigger (Button, 2016), selected by Adrian Matejka for the Button Poetry Chapbook Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the J. William Fulbright Program, the Cave Canem Foundation, and the American Literary Translators Association. He has lived and worked with youth in locations including Spain, South Africa, Chicago, St. Louis, and Kalamazoo. His poems and essays have appeared in publications including Boston Review, Callaloo, The New York Times, the Poetry Society of America, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series.
Updated March 17, 2022
