2022 PNM Flash Fiction Prize

Low $11 entry fee (a prime number)
Judged by the Press 53/Prime Number Magazine editorial team

“Prime 53 Poem”
Summer Challenge

Each summer, from June 1-July 31, we invite writers to send us a “Prime 53 Poem,” a specific form that contains exactly 53 syllables, and we publish our four favorite Prime 53 Poems for our readers to enjoy. This is a free contest and winners receive a free Press 53 book of their choice.

53-Word Story Contest

A free, monthly writing competition. Join our email list to get your prompt on the first day of each month.
Write a 53-word story about (prompt)
Then send your story by the fifteenth (15th) day of the month to 53wordstory@gmail.com

Get your prompt for this month’s contest here

Michael Hettich is the author of To Start an Orchard (Press 53). He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in New York City and its suburbs. He has lived in upstate New York, Colorado, Northern Florida, Vermont, Miami, and Black Mountain, North Carolina, where he now lives with his family. He has published over a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry, and his work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies. His awards include several Florida Individual Artists Fellowships, a Florida Book Award, The Tampa Review Prize in Poetry, and the David Martinson–Meadow Hawk Prize.

Gerry Wilson's debut novel, Spirit Light, is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing. Her debut story collection, Crosscurrents and Other Stories, was published by Press 53 in 2015 and nominated for the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Fiction Award. One of her stories, “Mating,” won the Prime Number Magazine Award for Short Fiction in 2014. Gerry is a recipient of a Mississippi Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowship. A seventh generation Mississippian, she grew up in Pontotoc, a little town nestled in the red clay hills of north Mississippi, thirty miles from William Faulkner’s Oxford and far from just about everywhere else.

Guest Poetry Editor Cheryl Wilder is the author of Anything That Happens, a Tom Lombardo Poetry Selection from Press 53, and What Binds Us (Finishing Line Press 2017), a chapbook that explores the frailty and necessity of human connection. Her work appears in Barely South Review, Prime Number Magazine, Verse Daily, Cream City Review, Literary Mama, and Architects + Artisans, among other publications. Cheryl has served as writer-in-residence at SistaWRITE and was granted residency at Sundress Academy for the Arts. A founder and editor of Waterwheel Review, she earned her BFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Cheryl lives near the Haw River in North Carolina. Visit Cheryl’s author page at Press53.com and read a poem from Anything That Happens.

Guest Short Fiction Editor Dennis McFadden won the 2016 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction with Jimtown Road: A Novel in Stories. He grew up in Brookville, a small town in western Pennsylvania very much like the fictional Hartsgrove of Jimtown Road. A graduate of Allegheny College and a retired project manager for the state of New York, he lives and writes in a cedar-shingled cottage called Summerhill in the woods of upstate New York. His stories have appeared in dozens of publications, including The Missouri Review, New England Review, The Sewanee Review, Crazyhorse, The Antioch Review, Prairie Fire, The Massachusetts Review, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and The Best American Mystery Stories. His first short story collection, Hart’s Grove, was published by Colgate University Press in 2010, and his recently published novel, Old Grimes Is Dead, received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews. In 2018 he was awarded a Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony. Visit Dennis’s Press 53 author page and download the title story from Jimtown Road: A Novel in Stories.