Vern Rutsala Book Prize
NEW DEADLINE for Submissions: November 30, 2025
A prize of $1,000 is awarded, plus publication of the manuscript and 50 free books. The judge is Robert Morgan.
Submit 70 to 90 pages of poetry and/or flash fiction, including a Table of Contents and Acknowledgments page. Reading fee is $25.
• Submissions are accepted from around the world with no citizenship limitations.
• The first 50 writers submitting to the contest receive a Cloudbank book or journal.
• To submit electronically through our submissions manager click here.
• Individual poems or flash fictions (up to 1,000 words) may have been previously published.
• Submissions should include two title pages, one with title only, one with title and author name.
• Cloudbank editors appreciate a wide range of styles, approaches, forms, and aesthetics; we welcome prose poems and flash fiction.
Robert Morgan is the author of several books of poems, including Terroir (2011) and Dark Energy (2015). To Honor the Imagined Whole: New Poems will be published in 2026. He has published twelve books of fiction, among them the New York Times bestseller Gap Creek, and, more recently, Chasing the North Star (2016), and In the Snowbird Mountains and Other Stories (2023). His works of nonfiction include Lions of the West (2011), the national bestseller Boone: A Biography (2007), and Fallen Angel: The Life of Edgar Allan Poe (2023). Recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is currently Kappa Alpha Professor of English (Emeritus) at Cornell University.