The 2026 Orison Prizes Are Open for Submissions!

The 2026 Orison Prizes are open for submissions from December 1, 2025 – April 1, 2026. Margot Livesey will judge in fiction and Leila Chatti will judge in poetry; the winner in each genre will receive $1,500 and publication of their book. Find complete guidelines here. Early submissions are encouraged, as they help us spread out the screening process!

ABOUT THE JUDGES

Leila Chatti is the author of the poetry collections Wildness Before Something Sublime (Copper Canyon Press, 2025) and Deluge, winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize and the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award. She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and fellowships and scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Frost Place Conference on Poetry, the Key West Literary Seminars, Dickinson House, and Cleveland State University, where she was the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing and Publishing. Most recently, she was the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. She currently teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University and is a Provost Fellow at the University of Cincinnati.

Margot Livesey's tenth novel, The Road from Belhaven, was published in 2024 by Knopf. The Hidden Machinery, a collection of essays on writing, was published by Tin House Books in 2017. Livesey has taught at Boston University, Bowdoin College, Brandeis University, Carnegie Mellon, Cleveland State, Emerson College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Tufts University, the University of California at Irvine, the Warren Wilson College MFA program for writers, and Williams College. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Artists’ Foundation, and the Canada Council for the Arts.