Jacinda Townsend to Judge Jacobs/Jones African-American Literary Prize
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WINSTON-SALEM—The Jacobs/Jones African-American Literary Prize, which honors the best in short prose by African-American writers in North Carolina, is now closed for submissions.
The contest, sponsored by NCWN and administered by the Creative Writing Program at UNC-Chapel Hill, is open to any African-American writer whose primary residence is in North Carolina. Entries may be fiction or creative nonfiction, but must not have been published before (including on any website, blog, or social media), and must be no more than 3,000 words.
The deadline is January 2, 2022. The winner will receive $1,000 and possible publication of their winning entry in The Carolina Quarterly.
The final judge of the 2022 Jacobs/Jones contest will be Jacinda Townsend.
Jacinda Townsend is the author of Saint Monkey (Norton, 2014), which is set in 1950s Eastern Kentucky and won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction. Saint Monkey was also the 2015 Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Her second novel, Mother Country, will be published by Graywolf Press in fall of 2022. Townsend teaches in the Zell Creative Writing program at the University of Michigan.
The Jacobs/Jones African-American Literary Prize honors the nineteenth-century writers Harriet Jacobs and Thomas H. Jones. Jacobs was born in 1813 near Edenton, escaping to Philadelphia in 1842, after hiding for seven years in a crawl space above her grandmother’s ceiling. She published her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, under a pseudonym in 1861. Jacobs died in 1897 and was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 1997.
Jones was born into slavery near Wilmington in 1806. Able to purchase the freedom of his wife and all but one of his children, he followed them north in 1849 by stowing away on a brig to New York. In the northeast and in Canada, he spoke as a preacher and abolitionist, writing his memoir, The Experience of Thomas Jones, in 1854, as a way to raise funds to buy his eldest child’s freedom.
This Jacobs/Jones African-American Literary Prize was initiated by Cedric Brown, a Winston-Salem native and graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“The literary award was borne out of my frustration with being unable to readily find much fiction or creative nonfiction that conveys the rich and varied existence of Black North Carolinians,” Brown said. “I wanted to incentivize the development of written works while also encouraging Black writers to capture our lives through storytelling.”
The winner of the 2021 Jacobs/Jones African-American Literary Prize was Isaac Hughes Green of Durham, for his short story, "Fifteens."
The full competition guidelines are listed below and can be found at www.ncwriters.org.
JACOBS/JONES AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERARY PRIZE
Postmark Deadline: January 2 (annual)
Submissions Accepted: November 1 – January 2
The Jacobs/Jones African-American Literary Prize honors Harriet Jacobs and Thomas Jones, two pioneering African-American writers from North Carolina, and seeks to convey the rich and varied existence of Black North Carolinians. The contest is administered by the Creative Writing Program at UNC-Chapel Hill. The winner receives $1,000 and possible publication of the winning entry in The Carolina Quarterly.
Eligibility and Guidelines
- The competition is open to any African-American writer whose primary residence is in North Carolina.
- Entries may be fiction or creative nonfiction, but must be unpublished, no more than 3,000 words, and concerned with the lives and experiences of North Carolina African-Americans. Entries may be excerpts from longer works, but must be self-contained. Entries will be judged on literary merit.
- An entry fee must accompany each submission: $10 for NCWN members, $20 for nonmembers. You may submit multiple entries, but the correct fee must accompany each one.
- You may pay the members’ entry fee if you join the NCWN when you submit.
- Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
- If submitting by mail, submit two copies of an unpublished manuscript, not to exceed 3,000 words, on single-sided pages, double-spaced, in black 12-point Times New Roman font, with 1-inch margins.
- The author’s name should not appear on the manuscript. Instead, include a separate cover sheet with name, address, phone number, e-mail address, word count, and manuscript title.
- To submit by USPS:
Jacobs/Jones African-American Literary Prize
UNC Creative Writing Program
Attn: Anita Braxton
Greenlaw Hall, CB#3520
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520
- To submit online, go to https://ncwriters.submittable.com/submit. Submittable will collect your entry fee via credit card ($10 NCWN members / $20 nonmembers). (If submitting online, do not include a cover sheet with your document; Submittable will collect and record your name and contact information.)
- Entries will not be returned.
- The winner will be announced in February.
For questions, please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
The non-profit North Carolina Writers’ Network is the state’s oldest and largest literary arts services organization devoted to all writers at all stages of development. For additional information, visit www.ncwriters.org.
Heather Bell Adams Wins 2021 Doris Betts Fiction Prize
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GREENVILLE—
Heather Bell Adams is the winner of the 2021 Doris Betts Fiction Prize for her story, “The Virgin of Guadalupe’s Moon.” Adams will receive a prize of $250 from the North Carolina Writers' Network, and her story will be published in the North Carolina Literary Review’s 2022 issue.
Heather Bell Adams is the author of the novels Maranatha Road (West Virginia University Press, 2017) and The Good Luck Stone (Haywire Books. 2020). Her writing has won the Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Award, the Carrie McCray Literary Award, and the James Still Fiction Prize and has appeared in, among other literary magazines, Still, The Thomas Wolfe Review, Atticus Review, Broad River Review, and Pembroke Magazine. A lifelong North Carolinian, she works as a lawyer in Raleigh and will serve as the 2022 Piedmont Laureate.
There were 126 stories submitted to the 2021 contest, and this year’s final judge was Monique Truong, author of the novels The Book of Salt, The Sweetest Fruits, and, set in North Carolina, Bitter in the Mouth. Truong explained her selection for the 2021 prize: “In prose as elegant and poised as the young Jackie Bouvier herself, ‘The Virgin of Guadalupe’s Moon’ imagines a moonlit night during her truncated honeymoon with Jack Kennedy in Acapulco, Mexico. We the reader know the inevitable, but this night is before the inevitable. The writer here has astutely situated them—and us—within the fertile territory of the possible. Like Acapulco itself, everything between Jackie and Jack is newly constructed, shining with a fresh gloss of the modern, and yet in the surrounding landscape there’s something alive and insatiable as their own desires, but not necessarily for each other. The writing here shimmers and glows, Jackie and Jack do too.”
Truong also gave honorable mention to “Invasive Pests” by Settle Monroe, praising “its intriguing, poignant juxtaposition of two narratives of destruction. From the insect world, there's a fast-moving, systematic one, and from the all-too human realm one that's incremental and grinding.” Monroe’s story will be published in 2022 as well. The author is a graduate student in the M.A. program in English at North Carolina State University.
The other finalists were “Playing Chess with Bulls” by Weaverville resident Sarah P. Blanchard, “Under My Skin” by UNC Chapel Hill Professor of Latin American Literature Oswaldo Estrada, and “Swept Away” by Greensboro resident Caroline McCoy.
The annual Doris Betts Fiction Prize honors the late novelist and short story writer Doris Betts, and is sponsored by the nonprofit North Carolina Writers’ Network, the state’s oldest and largest literary arts services organization devoted to writers at all stages of development. For additional information, visit www.ncwriters.org.
Published since 1992 by East Carolina University and the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, the North Carolina Literary Review has won numerous awards and citations. Go to http://www.nclr.ecu.edu/subscriptions for subscription information.