The Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival has opened its second annual fiction contest for a story by a writer who has not published a book. The winner will receive fifteen hundred dollars and a trip (travel, lodging, and an all-access event pass) to attend the twenty-fourth annual festival, which takes place between March 24 and 28, 2010, in the Big Easy.
Writers may submit as many stories as they'd like along with an entry fee of twenty-five dollars per submission. The pieces should be previously unpublished—publication in the New Orleans Review is also part of the prize—and weigh in under seven thousand words each. Jill McCorkle will serve as the judge.
The inaugural winner was Robin Martin of Brooklyn, New York, for "1969," selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford.
For the dramatists out there, the festival will also honor a one-act play with a fifteen hundred dollar prize, a trip to the 2010 event—a reading of the play will be staged there—and publication in Bayou, the literary magazine of the University of New Orleans. A full production of the play will go up at the 2011 festival.