Monkfish books are distributed in the US by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution. In Canada they are distributed by Publishers Group Canada and Raincoast. Beyond that they are distributed by Macmillan. I have seen their books in bookstores, personally.

The do not publish work aimed at children. If you think your work would be a good fit for them, please query first with a brief description of the work, any advance endorsements the book has received, a short authors bio, and an explanation of why you think Monkfish is the right publisher for your work. This means you should spend time with their catalog and ideally their books, before submitting.

Only query with completed manuscripts. If they are interested they will ask for the complete manuscript and a book proposal, which should “include a 250 word description of the book, a 100-150 word author bio that includes previous titles published, and an explanation as to why the author is the right person to write the book submitted. It should also include similar titles published within the last five years with an explanation as to how your book is different. Lastly, the book proposal should also include a marketing plan which focuses on the resources you, as the author, can bring to the marketing of your book.”

They only respond to submissions they are interested in.

They accept submissions via mail, reluctantly, and much prefer emailed submissions.

To learn more, visit their submission guidelines here.

Emily Harstone is the author of many popular books, including The Authors Publish Guide to Manuscript Submissions, Submit, Publish, Repeat, and The 2021 Guide to Manuscript Publishers.

You can read the first two issues of the journal online to get a sense of their style. Both digital editions are thoughtfully designed, and contain work from fewer than 10 contributors. The general theme of the first two editions is, “the production of art and writing under environmental and technological pressures.”

The first two issues contain solicited writing, whereas their third edition will contain unsolicited writing from submissions. Right now through August 23, The Momentist is seeking submissions for this third issue, which is not themed.

Poets may submit up to six poems. Authors of fiction may submit one story, no shorter than 1,000 words. There’s no word limit for fiction. The Momentist will also consider excerpts from longer stories. Authors of nonfiction may submit up to two pieces, no shorter than 1,500 words each. Nonfiction authors may pitch ideas before writing.

The Momentist also actively seeks translations. Translations should be accompanied by the work in its original language. Translators may pitch projects before completing them. The Momentist pays translators a small honorarium.

They also accept artwork in any medium.

The Momentist accepts submissions via email, not by post. They only accept submissions that follow the guidelines they’ve posted online, so please read these guidelines in full before submitting.

If you’d like to learn more or submit to The Momentist, please visit their website here.

Bio: Ella Peary is the pen name for an author, editor, creative writing mentor, and submission consultant. Over the past five years, she’s written hundreds of articles for Authors Publish, and she’s also served as a copywriter and copy editor for a wide range of organizations and individuals. She is the author of The Quick Start Guide to Flash Fiction. She occasionally teaches a course on flash fiction. You can contact her at ellapeary@gmail.com.

Here and Now 2023 – A Collaborative Residency

The Lagos International Poetry Festival and Moniack Mhor, Scotland’s Creative Writing Centre are inviting applications to Here and Now 2023 – A Collaborative Residency and Production Programme. The writers will spend one month at Moniack Mhor Writers’ Centre, and one month at LOATAD, the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora. During the residencies, participants will connect with local communities and build new audiences.

The residency includes a stipend of £2,000 plus travel, food costs, and accommodation, among other benefits.

The 2023 Here and Now Residency Programme is open to Scottish and West African established/mid-career writers. Applicants must have published at least one major work in poetry, non-fiction, playwriting, or songwriting: this could be a novel, a short story collection, a poetry pamphlet, an album, or a professionally staged production work.

Deadline is August 12, 2022. For details, go here.

Climate Tracker Global COP27 Journalism Fellowship (In-Person or Virtual)

Climate Tracker has announced their Global COP27 Journalism Fellowship. There are two ways you can join the fellowship to get training and cover the critical issues for your country and region throughout the UN Climate Negotiations (COP27) Conference taking place this year in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, from 7-18 November 2022. You could be with the team in Egypt for the in-person fellowship or you could opt to be part of their virtual team as online fellows. Either way, you’ll be receiving training from climate reporters with years of experience telling the COP stories. Ten (10) in-person fellows and twelve (12) online fellows will be selected for the COP27 Journalism Fellowship. You may apply for both in-person and virtual fellowship if you’re available for both opportunities. Different benefits exist for both fellowships which include stipend, travel and accommodation coverage, one month training, and mentoring, among others. Applicants should be aged 18-35 years and from or living in a developing country.

Deadline is August 19, 2022. For details, go here.

The Gotham’s Publish A Book Scholarship (For Writers of Color)

Applications are now open for Gotham’s Publish a Book Scholarship. This scholarship is open to writers of color who have completed a book manuscript (or nonfiction book proposal) and are ready to go to market with their book. Three scholarships will be offered every year, with at least one spot rewarded to a Black writer.

Each scholarship includes: Admittance to the Gotham Writers Conference—the panels and presentations as well as a seat at a pitching roundtable with two agents in your genre; the Gotham course How to Get Published or Nonfiction Book Proposal; a one-on-one Agent Evaluation session; and a Query Letter Coaching session, both with a literary agent. Acceptance is open to all people of color (age 18 and up) and based solely on the merit of your book project.

Deadline is August 15, 2022. For details, go here.

The Yale Drama Series 2023 Playwright Competition

The Yale Drama Series is seeking submissions for its 2023 playwriting competition. The winning play will be selected by the series’ current judge, Jeremy O. Harris. The winner of this annual competition will be awarded the David Charles Horn Prize of $10,000, publication of their manuscript by Yale University Press, and a celebratory event. The prize and publication are contingent on the playwright’s agreeing to the terms of the publishing agreement. The Yale Drama Series is intended to support emerging playwrights. Playwrights may win the competition only once. Plays that have been professionally produced or published are not eligible. Submissions must be original, unpublished full-length plays, with a minimum of 65 pages. Worldwide submissions are accepted.

Deadline is August 15, 2022. For details, go here.

Bocas Lit Fest Children’s Book Prize 2022

The annual BLF Children’s Book Prize is a prize that is given to one outstanding English-language children’s book for young independent readers, written by a Caribbean author. This Prize seeks to recognise and celebrate excellent writing and intriguing storytelling that can capture young imaginations and help establish a lifelong love and habit of reading in our young Caribbean demographic. The Prize consists of a cash award of US$1,000, and Caribbean-born authors, resident anywhere in the world, of English-language books which have been published between 1 August, 2021 and 31 August, 2022, are eligible. The winner will be announced in November 2022.

Deadline is August 31, 2022. For details, go here.

The 2022 Kikwetu Flash Fiction Contest

In its continued quest to showcase new and established writers from East Africa and beyond, the Kikwetu Journal is thrilled to launch its first writing contest as a special 8th issue to recognize exemplary work from a writer of African origin. For their 8th issue, Kikwetu seeks 1,200-word maximum flash fiction pieces from African writers on or off the continent. You may submit as many as two stories. The call-out is open-themed. The winner of the Kikwetu Flash Fiction Contest will receive a $150 cash prize in addition to their story being published in issue 8 of Kikwetu. Payment will be made via M-Pesa or PayPal.

Deadline is August 31, 2022. For details, go here.

American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation Awards 2022

The American-Scandinavian Foundation annually awards the following three translation prizes for outstanding translations of poetry, fiction, drama, or literary prose written by a twentieth or twenty-first-century Nordic author:

1. The Nadia Christensen Prize includes a $2,500 award, publication of an excerpt in Scandinavian Review, and a commemorative bronze medallion.
2. The Leif and Inger Sjöberg Award, given to an individual whose literature translations from a Nordic language have not previously been published, includes a $2,000 award, publication of an excerpt in Scandinavian Review, and a commemorative bronze medallion.
3. The Wigeland Prize, given to the best translation from Norwegian by a resident of Norway, includes a $2,000 award, publication of an excerpt in Scandinavian Review,and a commemorative bronze medallion.

Deadline is September 1, 2022. For details, go here.

Hodder Fellowship

The Hodder Fellowship will be given to artists and writers of exceptional promise to pursue independent projects at Princeton University during the academic year. Potential Hodder Fellows are composers, choreographers, performance artists, visual artists, writers, translators, or other kinds of artists or humanists who have “much more than ordinary intellectual and literary gifts”; they are selected more “for promise than for performance.” Given the strength of the applicant pool, most successful Fellows have published a first book or have similar achievements in their own fields; the Hodder is designed to provide Fellows with the “studious leisure” to undertake significant new work. An $88,000 stipend is provided for this 10-month appointment as a Hodder Fellow. Fellowships are not intended to fund work leading to an advanced degree. One need not be a U.S. citizen to apply. To apply, please submit a curriculum vitae, a 500-word project proposal, and samples of your work (i.e., writing sample, images of your work, video links to performances, etc.).

Deadline is September 13, 2022. For details, go here.

Princeton Arts Fellowships

Princeton Arts Fellowships are awarded to artists whose achievements have been recognized as demonstrating extraordinary promise in any area of artistic practice and teaching. Applicants should be early career poets, novelists, choreographers, playwrights, designers, performers, directors, filmmakers, composers, and performance artists. Princeton Arts Fellows spend two consecutive academic years (September 1-July 1) at Princeton University and formal teaching is expected. An $80,000 a year stipend is provided.

Deadline is September 13, 2022. For details, go here.

Bridport Prize Bursaries for Underrepresented Writers

Bridport Prize bursary gives underrepresented writers a free entry to the Bridport Prize competition in any category. In order to support as many writers as possible, applications are limited to one per year per writer. Bursary applications for the memoir award opened on 1st July 2022. The bursary runs on a rolling basis so you can apply for a memoir bursary anytime until 10th September 2022. Applications are reviewed in batches on a first-come-first-served basis and may take up to six weeks to process. The memoir competition closes on 30th September, so please make sure you leave enough time to submit your application.

For details, go here.

Bio: NmaHassan Muhammad is the pen name of a Nigerian children’s author, short story writer and poet. He’s working on a children’s poetry book in honor of his son Abdullateef Hamood. A recent Ebedi Fellow, he writes from Minna, Nigeria. He can be reached at Twitter handle, @NmaHassanM.

Things are always changing. Publishing is no exception. When I published my first picture book, the publishing house handled everything. They took my manuscript and illustrations and 18 months later a hard cover book came in the mail. It was stunning – beautifully designed and printed, my story displayed in its best possible light. Then, like magic, the book showed up in bookstores, school libraries, airport gift shops, and children’s museum book collections. When my first royalty check came, I bought a new car.  After three years the book went out of print and the rights converted back to me. During that period, I published six books with three different publishers. I did author visits and signed a lot of books. I thought about new book ideas. I assumed this was what my life would look like from then on, but things are always changing.

Amazon rocked the publishing world like a planet killing meteorite. Small bookstores closed. Then big bookstores closed. Publishing houses consolidated and bought each other out. Publishing lists contracted. Unsolicited submissions were no longer accepted without an agent. Agents were not selling as many books. I changed agents twice and could no longer sell my book ideas. I gave up my agent. I moved to small local presses and published field guides and picture books about the area. I learned how to use Indesign and self-published several workbooks and coloring books. I used a local book distributor and kept doing school visits.

I also kept submitting to the big publishers – the ones who were still accepting unsolicited submissions. I thank Authors Publish for sending out regular nudges about which publishers would take them. At first, I collected a stack of rejection letters big enough to wallpaper my entire living room. Then the publishers stopped sending rejection letters. Then the submissions went digital. I kept submitting. I had a few acceptances that fizzled when their children’s divisions were down-sized or editors fired. It was a minefield out there. I wearied of the process. I took all my writing and illustrations and started a science education website (Exploringnature.org). I sold subscription to schools and districts. But the siren song of book publishing would not let me go. I repeated the mantra – You will never publish if you don’t submit, submit, submit. So, I kept submitting – for another 10 years.

Then Covid came and changed everything – again. All my school visits were cancelled. Bookstores and gift shops closed – some to never reopen. The small press that had been publishing and distributing my books for years went bankrupt and closed. I suddenly had a lot of time at home (as did we all). I wrote and illustrated curriculum for the website, as schools were hungry for digital resources. I finished the art for a book about exploring at night with kids that I had been working on for several years with my daughter-in-law. I fleshed out another book idea that I’d had more than 20 years ago about rainforest animals helping to pollinate and spread the seeds of plants in a mutualistic partnership. I wasn’t sure what I would do with them, but the call to create books was still a powerful pull.

Then, one day, I got an issue of Authors Publish with several small presses that were new to me. I thought, what the heck… I submitted the two books I had been working on, one to each of the new publishers. Then something rather miraculous happened. Within 24 hours, one of the presses emailed back and offered me a contract. I was reeling from that when the second publisher emailed and wanted the other book. I was stunned. I still had lots of work to do on the rainforest book, but they were willing to wait. I signed a contract to sell A Night Walk with AM Ink Publishing in the fall of 2021. Then, when the art was complete, I signed a contract with Eifrig Publishing for The Rodent, the Bee, and the Brazil Nut Tree .

Times have changed. I did the layout for the books myself. I prepared bookmarks, posters, and downloadable curriculum guides for each book. I posted about the books on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. I emailed educators and bloggers asking for reviews (and will be doing that for a while yet). I will try to keep up with the changing world of book publishing as best I can, but to be honest, I have no idea what changes are coming next. Yet, the mantra endures. You will never publish if you don’t submit, submit, submit.

Bio: Sheri Amsel has combined a love of the outdoors with graduate degrees in science and biomedical illustration to create a body of work that includes writing and illustrating books, school programs, and illustrated interpretive signage for museums and nature centers across North America. She has more than 30 picture books, field guides, activity and coloring books in print.

In 2005, she created Exploringnature.org, an illustrated science education website, that is used by schools, educators, and families worldwide.

In 2009, she received the prestigious Elizabeth Abernathy Hull Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Environmental Education of Youths, by the Garden Club of America.