James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel

Submissions to the James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel are open January 1–February 28 each year. The winner receives $5,500 and publication by the University of Nebraska Press.

You will be required to remit an entry fee—$30 for nonmembers and $20 for AWP members—at the time of submission. All entry fees are nonrefundable. Be sure to verify your membership status before submitting by clicking your name at the top of the page when logged into the AWP website. Next to "Type," you will see your AWP membership status; if the type is NM Individual, you will need to either purchase a membership or submit to the nonmember category. (Please note that the submission categories refer only to pricing, and will not affect the level of consideration given to your manuscript.)

Submit your novel manuscript to the AWP member category

Submit your novel manuscript to the nonmember category

Note for new members: If you purchase a new membership just before submitting, be sure to log out of our submission portal by clicking Log Out on the left-hand sidebar, and then log back in using your AWP credentials, in order to give the system a chance to reset and update your membership status accordingly. Reach out to programs@awpwriter.org with any questions.

Submission Guidelines

Eligibility Requirements

Only book-length manuscripts are eligible. The AWP Award Series defines “book-length” as follows:

• poetry: 48 pages minimum text;
• short story collection or creative nonfiction: 150–300 manuscript pages; and
• novel: at least 60,000 and no more than 110,000 words.

Poems, stories, and essays previously published in periodicals are eligible for inclusion in submissions, but manuscripts previously published in their entirety, including self-published manuscripts, are not eligible. As the series is judged anonymously, no list of acknowledgments should accompany your manuscript.

The AWP Award Series is open to all authors writing original works primarily in English for adult readers. Mixed-genre manuscripts cannot be accepted. Criticism and scholarly monographs are not acceptable for creative nonfiction, which the AWP Award Series defines as factual and literary writing that has the narrative, dramatic, meditative, and lyrical elements of novels, plays, poetry, and memoir.

To avoid conflicts of interest, friends and former students of a judge (former students who studied with a judge in an academic degree-conferring program or its equivalent) are ineligible to enter the competition in the genre for which their former teacher is serving as judge.

Current staff of AWP and members of the AWP Board of Directors may not enter the AWP Award Series, and previous staff and board members may not enter for a minimum of three years after leaving AWP or rotating off the board, respectively.

AWP makes every effort to vary the judges by region, aesthetic, and institution so that writers, if ineligible one year, will certainly be eligible other years. If contestants win in any genre, they may not enter the competition again in the same genre for the next five consecutive years.

Terms & Conditions

• Your submitted manuscript must be an original work of which you are the sole author.
• The decision of the judge is final. The judge may choose no winner if he or she finds no manuscript that, in their estimation, merits publication and the award.
• Your manuscript must be submitted in accordance with the eligibility requirements, format guidelines, and entry requirements, or it will be disqualified.
• No entry fees will be returned.
• This competition is void where prohibited or restricted by law.

Manuscript Format Guidelines

Manuscripts must be typed and double-spaced. Poetry manuscripts may be single-spaced. Each manuscript must include a title page with the manuscript title only. If the author’s name appears anywhere on the manuscript, the submission will be disqualified. Do not add a page with acknowledgment of previous publications or a biographical note. Please upload your manuscript to our submission system as a .doc, .docx, or .pdf file.

Entry Requirements

• Please upload your manuscript to our submission system as a .doc, .docx, or .pdf file.
• You will be required to remit an entry fee—$30 for nonmembers and $20 for AWP members—at the time of submission. All entry fees are nonrefundable. Students and faculty who have been registered by their program directors as members of AWP are eligible for the member fee. (Please note that if you are not an AWP member and submit to the member category, your submission will be disqualified).
• You may enter in more than one genre, and you may also enter multiple manuscripts in one genre, provided that each manuscript is uploaded separately as an individual entry.

2026 Judge

Justin Torres is the author of Blackouts, which won the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction, as well as the California Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Lambda Literary Award. A 2024 Guggenheim fellow, he’s also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. His first novel, We the Animals, was a national bestseller and was adapted into a feature film. He lives in Los Angeles and is an associate professor of English at UCLA.