The rules of writing

Please read the Contest Rules carefully

• Submit a work of fiction in English of no more than 4000 words.
• Include only your own original work.
• Please submit before the submission deadline of June 30th 2018 23:59:59 EST.
• Send your story in reply to the confirmation email, or at any time before the submission deadline to service@goldenkeyscribes.com, including the word “submission” in the email.
• Include the required information in your submitted document:
  • Include your name and valid e-mail address on the first page of your document. We need these to double-confirm the information from the submission form, to be sure we can inform you if you win.
• Please send the reading fee of 20 USD using the submission forms below. The fee is nonrefundable.
• The decision of the judges is final. Find out more about our panel of judges.
• The announcement of the winner will be July 20^th, 2018.

Stories will be evaluated by a panel of writers, teachers and editors.

Anne Panning

Jurist

Anne Panning’s novel, Butter, was published by Switchgrass Books in 2012. She has published two short story collections: The Price of Eggs and Super America, which won The 2006 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and was selected as a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Anne has also published short fiction and nonfiction in places such as The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, New Letters, Passages North, Black Warrior Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Quarterly West, Five Points, The Greensboro Review, The Hawai’i Review, Newsweek International, Kalliope, West Branch, Phoebe, Fourth Genre and many others. Four of her essays have been listed as Notable in The Best American Essays series.

In 2009, Anne was honored as New York Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation. She has also been honored with The Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching by SUNY-Brockport in 2006. She is currently a Professor of English at SUNY-Brockport and Co-Director of The Brockport Writers Forum reading series.

Maria Brandt

Jurist
 

Maria Brandt has published plays, fiction, and nonfiction in several literary magazines, including InDigest, Rock & Sling, Arts & Letters, Prime Number Magazine, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, VIDA, upstreet, Cleaver, and Mom Egg. Most recently, her collection New York Plays was produced by Out of Pocket Productions and published by Heartland Plays, her novella All the Words won the Grassic Short Novel Prize and was published by Evening Street Press, and her full-length play Swans will be co-produced by Straw Mat Writers and Method Machine at Geva Theatre Center’s Fielding Stage. Maria teaches Creative Writing at Monroe Community College in Rochester, NY, and is a founding member of Straw Mat Writers. She lives just outside Highland Park with her son William.​

Maria Brandt is not only an award-winning author in multiple genres, she is a visionary teacher who lives in and through the transformative power of the written word. Her gifts include not only mastery of craft, but, more importantly, her dedication to sharing that craft. Maria and the Straw Mat writing group she founded with her colleagues built, from scratch, one of the finest creative writing programs at any community college in the US. Maria changes lives.

 

Jay Keith
Associate Professor of English
Monroe Community College

Jay Keith

Jurist and co-coordinator

Jay Keith, Associate Professor of English at Monroe Community College, has been a teacher of writing and literature for over two decades. Courses he has designed and taught include Technical Communication, Business Communication, Introduction to Literature, The Short Story, The Modern Novel, 20th Century Novel, Introduction to Science Fiction, Masculinity and the Modern Novel, Representations of Masculinity, Communicating Professional Identity and Shakespeare. He has also run both local and national writing contests for undergraduate students and is the author of numerous technical documents for both Monroe Community College, a document management company and a robotics company. He is currently embarking on a new technical writing project for a nuclear power plant.

John Barefield

Jurist and co-coordinator

John is an American writer, translator and teacher based in Budapest. John has translated and edited hundreds of literary, legal, and medical texts. He has maintained Scribes since 2012 and is editor-in-chief of the new online literary magazine The Hickory Stump, debuting April 4. He has co-authored numerous textbooks, his most recent being ECL EXAMINATION TOPICS English Level C1.