CRAFT Flash Fiction Contest
The CRAFT Flash Fiction Contest is an annual award for unpublished flash fiction up to 1,000 words, and is open to entries every September and October and awarded the following March. Three winners are selected by a guest judge, with $3,000 and publication awarded. Several pieces are selected by CRAFT editors for editors' choice.
Judges:
De Nuevo by A. J. Rodriguez
The blocks of the Westside development whipped by us. All the houses bled into one another, a single stroke of adobe beige. No veterinarian had settled into this part of Albuquerque—it was too new, plastic, hollow. If one had…
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Riders by Pete Stevens
My wife wants to know what my new job is, the title, so I tell her what the woman at dispatch told me, that I’m a nonemergency medical driver, which means I’m there when the situation isn’t dire, when…
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What the Mouth Knows by Amina Gautier
We search the face of every old Puerto Rican man we meet, hoping to see our grandfather’s face looking back at us. The way to and from school is paved with old brown Boricua men. Up Riverdale and Rockaway,…
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Fangs by Tara Isabel Zambrano
The monsoon our mother delivers a boy, we’re saved from our father’s anger. Our hands are raw, unrecognizable, carrying hot water, tugging clean sheets beneath our mother’s heels, taut like our names. The baby looks whittled out of a…
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The Life Cycle of Fire by Rosaleen Lynch
We can’t take Mam’s new baby to school, the boys guess as much from my silence and nobody wants Mam to wake and make Baby cry, so when I put him to feed there’s quiet, just suckling sounds and…
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When It Gets Cold in the South, You Get a Jesus, You Get a Jesus, Everybody Gets a Goddamn Jesus by Exodus Oktavia Brownlow
Honey, MS, 1973 I When it gets cold in the South, Mama puts Devilish-Daddy out, again. It’s where he belongs, she says, cold is like warm milk to funny daddies like the one y’all got. All it gone do…
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Everything Is Haram and So Are You; or, What to Do with a Birthday Card by Arshia Simkin
In high school, you know a girl who disappears months before graduation. One day, she stops coming to school, and you never see her again. Usually, you avoid the other Muslim kids—the ones who dance to bhangra music during…
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It Will Be All of These Things by Ruth LeFaive
Nine of us cram into Brad O’Neill’s dad’s Buick, a girl to each lap, and Gulp’s snugging my middle before all the doors crash shut. I look back to see his tanned cheekbones; it’s really him, Gulp North, under…
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In the Winter by Puloma Ghosh
I become quite pretty in the winter, in the dim afternoons with sheet metal skies. I line my lips with brown, burgundy, wine and whiskey stains. I crave bright fruits as though they’ll substitute the daylight—sunset persimmons, sunrise grapefruit,…
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