The 2024 Orison Prizes in Poetry & Fiction will be open for submissions of book manuscripts from Dec. 1, 2023 – April 1, 2024. Ellen Bass will judge in poetry, and Kaveh Akbar in fiction.
The winner in each genre will receive $1,500, a royalties contract, and publication by Orison Books.
Find submission guidelines here.
ABOUT THE JUDGES
Ellen Bass’s most recent collection, Indigo, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Her other poetry books include Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Her poems appear frequently in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and many other journals. Among her awards are Fellowships from The Guggenheim Foundation, The NEA, and The California Arts Council, as well as The Lambda Literary Award and four Pushcart Prizes. She co-edited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks!, and her nonfiction books include The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse and Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth. A Chancellor Emerita of The Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz, California jails, and teaches in the MFA writing program at Pacific University.
Kaveh Akbar's first novel, Martyr!, is forthcoming from Knopf in 2024. He is also the author of two poetry collections, Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf, 2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James, 2017), in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry, 2016). Akbar is the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine (Penguin Classics, 2022) and co-editor, with Paige Lewis, of Another Last Call: Poets on Addiction and Deliverance (Sarabande, 2023). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and elsewhere.