Salamander 2025 Fiction Contest

SUBMIT: May 1 through June 1, 2025 | READING FEE: $20

SUBMIT ENTRIES NOW

January Praise

poetry
  Grateful I wasn’t the one my mother miscarried. Grateful for being blind in only one eye, for having all my fingers. Grateful a homemade explosive never went off in…

On the A Train, Manhattan

poetry
  I’m wedged against a man holding the pole with one hand, an iPhone with the other, he’s working a crossword’s checkered semaphore of blacks and whites, each space an…

Meteor

poetry
  When my evangelical cousin texts You just must never have witnessed a miracle   I think of Doug punting the basketball. We were ten. He kicked it a good…

At Land’s End

poetry
  This garden, its descendants of Stanley’s anemones, flowing, pearlescent like the insides of shells, their offspring mine now, in my yard, fragile beside the orange blare of Dugan’s trumpet…

Open It

poetry
Translated by Aviya Kushner   Open the window open it what do you already have to fear tear the window what is already out there breathe the wild skies beauty…

Eighteen Years After He Left the World

poetry
Translated by Aviya Kushner   He was not relevant, in the Population Registry they lost the documents, in the Interior Ministry they claimed it wasn’t possible to verify facts, I…

Forty-nine

poetry
translated from the Hebrew by Aviya Kushner   Pretty hands, ankles still pretty, white breasts, fattish ass (from where this plenty?) strong gaze weak sight nine-and-a-half years and more countless…

The Land of Cockaigne

poetry
                          after the painting by Pieter Bruegel   The table is always set. We can eat our way through anything. Memory and desire silence the squeals of the slaughtered— never…

The Beggars

poetry
                          after the painting by Pieter Bruegel   Travel is travail the shortest trek is turmoil Mother Earth holds us close so low there is nothing we don’t look up…

Villain

poetry
translated from the Chinese by Fiona Sze-Lorrain   A villain can’t be someone concrete. A villain can be a neighbor, but not mine can be a leader, but not yours…

Salamander 2018 Fiction Contest Winners

Announcements
  Matthew Dougherty is the winner of the 2018 Salamander Fiction Contest with his story "Tokoloshe," and Heather De Bel is the second-place winner with her story "Listening to Birds."   Of the…

Salamander Fiction Contest 2018 Results

Winner Matthew Dougherty, “Tokoloshe” Second Place Heather De Bel, “Listening to Birds” Finalists Kelle Groom, “A Beginners Guide to Hieroglyphs” Kate Lister Campbell, “Boiling Out” Bridgette Shade, “Lifespan of a…