This prize awards $1,000 and possible publication in Ecotone to a piece of unconventional journalism not to exceed 2,000 words. Second and Third-Place winners will receive $300 and $200 respectively.
Josina Guess will judge.
Josina Guess is a writer, mother, farmer, and editor. She is a senior writer for The Bitter Southerner where she served as assistant and managing editor. She’s an MFA student in the narrative nonfiction program at the University of Georgia Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. Her work is published in Ecotone, Fourth Genre, About Place Journal, and more. She contributed to Wisdom of Communities Volume 4: Sustainability in Community: Resources and Stories about Creating Eco-Resilience in Intentional Community (2018), Fight Evil with Poetry Anthology Volume 1 (2018), Rally: Communal Prayers for The Lovers of Jesus and Justice (2020), and the forthcoming Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic (Lookout Books, Fall 2022). She was born in Alabama, raised in Washington, D.C., studied art at Earlham College, and lived in Philadelphia for over a decade before putting down roots in rural Georgia.
Subjects for essays submitted to the Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Competition may include traditional categories such as reviews, travel articles, profiles or interviews, place/history pieces, or culture criticism.
This competition is facilitated by the University of North Carolina at Wilmington Department of Creative Writing, which runs a small press, Lookout Books, and a sister literary magazine, Ecotone.
Ecotone’s mission is to publish and promote the best place-based work being written today. Founded at the University of North Carolina Wilmington in 2005, the award-winning magazine features writing and art that reimagine place, and our authors interpret this charge expansively. An ecotone is a transition zone between two adjacent ecological communities, containing the characteristic species of each. It is therefore a place of danger or opportunity, a testing ground. The magazine explores the ecotones between landscapes, literary genres, scientific and artistic disciplines, modes of thought.
Recent contributors include Destiny O. Birdsong, Brock Clarke, Kenji C. Liu, Mesha Maren, and Jennifer Tseng.
Rose Post worked for the Salisbury Post for fifty-six years as a reporter, feature writer, and columnist. She won numerous state and national awards for her writing and earned the NC Press Women’s top annual award four times. She received the O. Henry Award from the Associated Press three times, the Pete Ivey Award, and the School Bell Award for educational coverage. Nationally, she won the 1989 Ernie Pyle Award, the Scripps Howard Foundation National Journalism Award for human-interest writing, and the 1994 National Society of Newspaper Columnists’ Award.
The winner of the 2021 Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Competition was Heather Bell Adams of Raleigh, for her essay “Show Me.”
The full competition guidelines are listed below and can be found at www.ncwriters.org.
Eligibility and Guidelines
- The competition is open to any writer who is a legal resident of North Carolina or a member of the North Carolina Writers’ Network.
- The postmark deadline is January 15.
- The entry fee is $10 for NCWN members, $12 for nonmembers.
- Entries can be submitted in one of two ways:
- Send two printed copies through the U.S. Postal Service (see guidelines and address below), along with a check for the appropriate fee, made payable to the North Carolina Writers’ Network.
- Submit an electronic copy online at http://ncwriters.submittable.com, and pay by VISA or MasterCard.
- Simultaneous submissions ok, but please notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
- Each entry must be an original and previously unpublished manuscript of no more than 2,000 words, typed in a 12-point standard font (i.e., Times New Roman) and double-spaced.
- Author’s name should not appear on manuscripts. Instead, include a separate cover sheet with name, address, phone number, e-mail address, word count, and manuscript title. (If submitting online, do not include a cover sheet with your document; Submittable will collect and record your name and contact information.)
- An entry fee must accompany the manuscript. Multiple submissions are accepted, one manuscript per entry fee: $10 for NCWN members, $12 for nonmembers.
- You may pay the member entry fee if you join NCWN with your submission. Checks should be made payable to the North Carolina Writers’ Network.
- Entries will not be returned. Winners will be announced in March.
- When you submit online at https://ncwriters.submittable.com/submit, Submittable will collect your entry fee via credit card ($15 NCWN members / $25 non-members). (If submitting online, do not include a cover sheet with your document; Submittable will collect and record your name and contact information. For more information about Submittable, click here.)
- To submit as a Member of NCWN ($10), click here.
- To submit as a Non-Member of NCWN ($12), click here.
- If submitting by mail, send submission to: