Essay Press / MFA Book Contest

Each year the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics sponsors a book contest with our friends at Essay Press, which is dedicated to publishing artful, innovative, and culturally relevant prose.

The EP/UWB MFA Book Contest publishes manuscripts that extend or challenge the formal possibilities of prose, including but not limited to: lyric essays and prose poems or poetics; experimental biography and autobiography; innovative approaches to journalism, interdisciplinary historiography, criticism, scholarship and philosophy. Simultaneous submissions, multiple submissions, collaborative manuscripts, digital and hybridized text/art manuscripts are all welcome.

The winner of the contest receives an award of $1,000, book publication by Essay Press, and travel expenses for an invited reading at UW Bothell. Our students interview the authors for publication online and have the chance to interact with them at events on and off-campus.

The contest opens each autumn and has rotating judges. For complete guidelines, please visit Essay Press.


Previous winners

2022

Kelly Puig

Kelly Puig

The Book of Embers
Selected by Amaranth Borsuk

Toby Altman

Toby Altman

Jewel Box
Editors’ Choice Selection


2021

The 2021 Contest was judged by Rondaldo V. Wilson.

Jade Lascelles

Jade Lacelles

Violence Beside

Sarah Rose Nordgren

Sarah Rose Nordgren

The Bird Hat Wearer’s Journal


2020

The 2020 Contest was judged by Renee Gladman.

Valerie Hsiung

Valerie Hsiung

To Love an Artist


2019

The 2019 Contest was judged by Jill Magi and Ching-In Chen.

Silvina López Medin

 Silvina López Medin

Poem That Never Ends
(Photo credit: Martí­n Sonzogni)

Yanara Friedland

 Yanara Friedland

Groundswell
(Photo credit: Benjamin M Johnson)


2018

The 2018 Contest was judged by Mary-Kim Arnold and Rebecca Brown.

Katherine Agyemaa Agard

Katherine Agyemaa Agard

of color
(Photo credit: Gabriel Woodham)

Kaia Preus

Kaia Preus

The War Requiem
(Photo credit: Amy Stockhaus)