Two years ago FE started holding an annual open genre book prize contest. As of 2025 the winner receives a 3 week residency at The Rice Place (a small artist residency outside Portland, OR, where FE is based), a standard royalty contract, and a $1500 cash prize. $25 per submission. Fee waivers eligible for eligible writers; if you pay more to submit you can also get a discounted FE book or record of your choice. A guest judge picks the winner; this year that judge was the ambidextrous writer Brandon Shimoda.
For our 2025 contest we had 571 submissions, which we narrowed down to 8 finalists. We received the most entries last year for any contest that we have ever held. (When I was younger I remember presses like T_____ and probably others would be like “We had 2851 amazing submissions this year and from those outstanding entries we have selected 3 books for publication” and my thoughts were always “That is an absolutely insane amount of submissions if it’s true” and “I am very much never going to be published by T_____.”)
We had 9 readers for the contest–former or current FE editorial assistants, along with the press’s main 3 editors and one friend of the press who previously read for an FE contest. Each person was assigned roughly 60 books to read and assess and was given 3 or so months to do so.
Narrowing it down to 8 finalists was, of course, extraordinarily hard. Both because there were so many good manuscripts and also because embracing chance and luck is tough, in the sense that–I know we missed some things. It’s impossible not to. We are a small primarily volunteer led press and no one was getting paid to read or anything; pure labor love, etc. It takes time. Even though the press has a (wavy) aesthetic, one primarily geared around undefinability, individual reader tastes are also individual reader tastes. Submittable, the submission system that we use, forces decisions into three tiers: Accept, Positive Reject, Reject. Of course there is a Notes field also, where one is allowed to give their short or long winded assessment of each book. But still. In my humble, nuance can be and is lost.
I hate when crotchety writers, oftentimes older or unhappily midlist or both, insist on telling people in essays or interviews how “There’s so much bad writing in the world, constantly being published. There’s so much bad it overshadows the good” or any variations therein. (When these writers make such proclamations, of course, they, tacitly or overtly, place themselves in the good-minority.) Is there bad writing being published? Sure. But that’s also a subjective, opinion-based thing and, further–who cares? I personally think that there is so much good writing being published, everywhere, across genres, all the time, that I will never be able to catch up in this lifetime or the next or the next. Negatrons suck. And sure, we did have some submitted books that, after reading a single page, I knew was either no bueno or simply not for FE. But for probably 150+ submitted manuscripts? It was way harder. After the initial screenings we had 84 manuscripts labeled Accept–and all of them had merit, were publishable or near it.
Since we are an “experimental” press (I know it’s true; I just don’t love the word) we got a number of experimentalesque manuscripts. Specifically there were a lot of:
- Books with pictures or images (One heads up–including color images is fine, but always know that if the book is accepted for publication that color is probably going to be rendered in black and white or greyscale. Color printing is just so expensive, at least for a small press. And do not, like one submitter did, state that if the images aren’t in color then the whole thing won’t work. That tells me that the book’s language isn’t too hot.)
- “Project based” books (15 years ago talking about your book as a project was a big deal and people debated it; poetry is not a project, it is kinda or can be, etc. I’m cool with anything, but a decent amount of the books submitted did utilize project framework, in some way, shape or form. They weren’t just poems or essays broken down into three or four different sections or something.)
- Books with wavy or braided narrative threads, non-normative, discursive, digressive, type stuff. Round and round but not back again necessarily.
Over those 3 months we read, we discussed, we inputted notes, we agreed and disagreed with each other. I’m still not sure we chose the best books, though, as finalists. Or we did, but it depends on your definition of “best,” which depends on your taste and what you think a contest winning book is or isn’t. It’s tough. And, again, people think different things. Depends on the day, one’s mood, etc. One’s taste! While writing this I just saw on Instagram that a long standing press that I really like and respect awarded their annual book prize winner to a book that we put as Reject. It wasn’t our thing and we had no real conversation about it. That same press, though, for a different book contest of theirs, chose one of our finalists as their winner—so that writer had to withdraw the manuscript. (We initially had 9 finalists for our contest). But that’s the beauty of art, eh? It changes from day to day, season to season. No one knows anything or everyone knows everything and on and on it goes. We announce the winner in early April. I wonder what manuscript Brandon will pick, but I think getting to that point we tried our best. Which is all you can do. And if you by chance submitted to the contest and we rejected your book–straight up, it wasn’t because it wasn’t good. Because I bet it was.
I believe in you.
–Jeff Alessandrelli