“This distinguished quarterly has consistently provided a refuge for intelligent, unacademic criticism of literature and the arts, as well as some of the most thoughtful contemporary poetry and short fiction.”
Congratulations to Evan Howell for winning first prize in our fiction contest with “Salamander”! Further congratulations to second-prize winner Reyumeh Ejue for “Full Term,” and third-prize winners Annie Zaidi for “Zinneas in the Graveyard” and Brecht De Poortere for “The Rest Is Silence.” We are so honored to be publishing their work.
“Salamander” is featured in our Autumn 2024 issue. “Full Term” will appear in Winter 2025. Third-prize stories TBD.
Thank you to everyone who submitted last year! Our next fiction contest opens September 2025.
Our managing editor Ron Koury’s new anthology, War and Imagination: Perspectives from the Hudson Review, will have a book launch and panel Tuesday, October 15, 2024 at 6 p.m. EDT at the New York Society Library and streaming.
Register for in-person event (space limited): $15 Register for virtual event: $10 War and Imagination includes selections from Tennessee Williams, Louis Simpson, Nina Bogin, Leo Tolstoy, Lara Prescott, Maxine Kumin, Benjamin Fondane, Maria Terrone, Brooke Allen, and more. In this event, contributors Cary Holladay, Marilyn Nelson, Lara Prescott, and Brooke Allen discuss ways in which experiences of war are unique, yet with aspects of the universal present in each.
About the anthology:
Stories of war and conflict form the backbone of much of the Western literary canon, portraying a certain image of heroism, stoicism, and survival in the face of violence. War and Imagination, edited by Ronald Koury, challenges the canon with essays, short stories, and a wide variety of perspectives.
Paying particular attention to the twentieth century and prioritizing the writings of civilians, the works highlighted in War and Imagination offer an opportunity to challenge representations of well-known conflicts with a wide variety of pieces from the front lines and beyond, such as letters from German soldiers at the siege of Stalingrad, a Holocaust memoir by physicist Abraham Pais, a previously unpublished story by Tennessee Williams, a haunting tale of the Spanish Civil War, and a fresh translation of the final act of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The selections make real the unimaginable horrors of survival during wartime while showcasing unique interpretations that allow readers to ponder the mystery from another point of view.
Panel speakers:
Well-known Southern author Cary Holladay has received an O. Henry Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. “The Bridge,” her story in the anthology, appears in her collection Horse People: Stories (Louisiana State University Press, 2013). Her most recent book is Images of America: Glen Allen (Arcadia Publishing, 2022).
Marilyn Nelson is an American poet. A professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut and the former poet laureate of Connecticut, she is also a winner of several important awards, among them the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, and the Frost Medal. In spring 2000, a fellowship in Contemplative Practices sponsored by the Center for the Contemplative Mind in Society, funded by the Fetzer Institute, allowed her to teach two sections of “Poetry and Meditation” to two groups of cadets at the US Military Academy at West Point.
Lara Prescott’s debut novel The Secrets We Kept was published by Knopf in 2019 (and has been published in thirty countries). She currently lives in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Noted literary critic Brooke Allen is a contributing editor of The Hudson Review who teaches in the Bennington Prison Education Initiative. Her most recent book is Benazir Bhutto: Favored Daughter (New Harvest, 2016).
It has been brought to our attention that some writers submitting stories to us via Submission Manager have been getting a “mail failure” message. Rest assured, these submissions are nonetheless being received, and, if applicable, new accounts are being created. You can double-check the status of your submission (or your new account) by logging in and seeing if your submission is there. If you do not see your submission, or if you would like additional confirmation of receipt, please email us ([email protected]) but please do not submit your story multiple times and please do not email your story to us. Our apologies for the inconvenience and confusion while we try to fix this, and we look forward to reading your work!
The Hudson Review is open to fiction submissions from September 1 to November 30. Online submissions close at 11:59 p.m. on November 30; mailed submissions must be postmarked by November 30. Guidelines as follows:
10,000 word limit.
No simultaneous submissions.
No previously published work (if your story has appeared in any form, including online—in a blog, social media posts, etc.—we consider it to be previously published work).
Submit online or by mail (enclose SASE) to 33 W. 67th St., New York, NY 10023.
Reading is not blind; feel free to include contact info in your manuscript. (We’re not picky about formatting.)
As always, there is no submission fee. (: Submit here!
Questions? Email us at [email protected].
We look forward to reading your work!
Only just recently, an anthology of Hudson Review essays, stories, and poems, edited by Ronald Koury, our managing editor, was released by Syracuse University Press:
On Wednesday, July 24, we were honored to conduct our first-ever webinar with the winners of our inaugural Frederick Morgan Poetry Contest. Many thanks to our incredible poets, Chiwenite Onyekwelu, Othuke Umukoro, and John Mulcare, for joining us to read their poems and participate in a Q&A. We’re also grateful to Helen Houghton, board member and contest sponsor, and contest judge and advisory editor David Mason for their thoughtful introductions. Please see the full recording below!
To make a long story short: we want your stories! The Hudson Review’s biennial short story contest is open from September 1, 2023 to November 30, 2023. Online submissions close at 11:59 p.m. on November 30; mailed submissions must be postmarked November 30. Guidelines as follows:
Open to writers never before published in The Hudson Review.
10,000 word limit.
No simultaneous submissions.
No previously published work.
Submit online or by mail (enclose SASE) to 33 W. 67th St., New York, NY 10023.
No submission fee.
First prize: $1000.
Second and third prizes: $500.
Winning stories will be published in The Hudson Review. All submissions will be considered for publication and payment at our regular rates.
Check out the 2021 winners: “Grain” by Lori J. Williams; runners-up “God’s Appointments” by Sam Levy & “A Name for Everything” by Roy Parvin. SUBMISSION MANAGER
We can’t wait to read your work!
Dearest,
It is snowing, grotesquely snowing
upon the small faces of the dead.
Those dear loudmouths, gone for over a year,
buried side by side
like little wrens.
But why should I complain?
The dead turn over casually,
thinking:
Good! No visitors today.
My window, which is not a grave,
is dark with my fierce concentration
and too much snowing
and too much silence.
The snow has quietness in it; no songs,
no smells, no shouts nor traffic.
When I speak
my own voice shocks me.
Tuesday
I have invented a lie,
there is no other day but Monday.
It seems reasonable to pretend
that I could change the day
like a pair of socks.
To tell the truth
days are all the same size
and words aren’t much company.
If I were sick, I’d be a child,
tucked in under the woolens, sipping my broth.
As it is,
the days are not worth grabbing
or lying about.
Monday
It would be pleasant to be drunk:
faithless to my own tongue and hands,
giving up the boundaries
for the heroic gin.
Dead drunk
is the term I think of,
insensible,
neither cool nor warm,
without a head or a foot.
To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool.
I will try it shortly.
Monday
Just yesterday,
twenty eight men aboard a damaged radar tower
foundered down seventy miles off the coast.
Immediately their hearts slammed shut.
The storm would not cough them up.
Today they are whispering over Sonar.
Small voice,
what do you say?
Aside from the going down, the awful wrench,
The pulleys and hooks and the black tongue . . .
What are your headquarters?
Are they kind?
Monday
It must be Friday by now.
I admit I have been lying.
Days don’t freeze
And to say that the snow has quietness in it
is to ignore the possibilities of the word.
Only the tree has quietness in it;
quiet as a pair of antlers
waiting on the cabin wall,
quiet as the crucifix,
pounded out years ago like a handmade shoe.
Someone once
told an elephant to stand still.
That’s why trees remain quiet all winter.
They’re not going anywhere.
Monday
Dearest,
where are your letters?
The mailman is an impostor.
He is actually my grandfather.
He floats far off in the storm
with his nicotine mustache and a bagful of nickels.
His legs stumble through
baskets of eyelashes.
Like all the dead
he picks up his disguise,
shakes it off and slowly pulls down the shade,
fading out like an old movie.
Now he is gone
as you are gone.
But he belongs to me like lost baggage.
—Anne Sexton
(from The Hudson Review, Vol. XV, Number 2, Summer 1962)
