Unpublished Entries | Stories may not have been previously published nor be forthcoming. You are welcome to submit your story to other publications or contests while we consider it for the prize, but please alert us if your story is going to be published or honored elsewhere, so we can take it out of the running. If you have more than one story to submit, create a new entry for each.

Anonymous Manuscripts | Please do NOT include your name or any other identifying information on any page of the story manuscript.

Contest Judge | Contest judge Jaime Cortez and editors of the The Tusculum Review will determine the winner of the 2025 prize. Family, friends, and previous students of the contest judge and the The Tusculum Review editors are disqualified from the competition, as are those with reciprocal professional relationships. Previous winners of Tusculum Review contests are also disqualified. Previous finalists and honorable mentions may enter.

Blind Judging | Names and identifying information will not be visible to the judges. The Tusculum Review reserves the right to extend the call for manuscripts or cancel the award. We have only canceled one of the 30+ contests we’ve hosted, due to single-digit entries. We look forward to reading your work.

Publication Rights | Except for second printings of the journal due to demand, all rights to material in The Tusculum Review and chapbooks revert to the individual authors and artists after publication (first serial rights). We request that you acknowledge us if you reprint work we published first. The chapbook design belongs to The Tusculum Review. Tusculum University does not discriminate on the basis of gender, race, age, sexual orientation, identity, religion, veteran or military status, citizenship status, ethnic origin, or disability.

Chapbook Launch and Marketing | The debut of the prizewinning chapbook is our most important annual event. When possible, we bring the prizewinner to campus for the live launch, where they read for, and take questions from, an audience of community members and students, many of whom have already read and discussed the writer’s work: the prizewinner is greeted by fans. The visiting writer may be asked to lead a workshop of student fiction earlier in the day. A student editor will interview and write a profile of the winning author for publication on our website in advance of the launch event. We will use photographs of the author, quotes from their story, and blurbs from the contest judge to market the prizewinning chapbook and the event. After filming the live launch, we’ll include portions of the recording on our website. We will submit the prizewinning story for consideration for the Pushcart Prizes, the O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, and other relevant recognition.

Contest judge Jaime Cortez is a California writer and artist based in Watsonville and the SF Bay Area. His writing and drawings have appeared in Kindergarten: Experimental Writing For Children (Black Radish Press), No Straight Lines (Fantagraphics), Street Art San Francisco (Abrams Press), and Infinite Cities (UC Berkeley Press). He wrote and illustrated the graphic novel Sexile for AIDS Project Los Angeles. His debut short story collection, Gordo, was published in 2021 by Black Cat, an imprint of Grove Atlantic. Gordo received national acclaim from the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. It was nominated for the Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Fiction and the Lambda Literary Award for fiction, and was named a best book of the year by National Public Radio and Bookpage. Cortez received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and his MFA from UC Berkeley. Jaime’s website is www.jaimecortez.org.