ANNOUNCING
Cleaver’s 2024 Short Creative Nonfiction Contest
Creative nonfiction is a genre of exploration into ourselves, our society, and our world. We invite short works that explore life in its dualities: memory and imagination, self and society, perfection in flaws, language and its limitations, how the truth can both unite and divide. Far from singular or simple, the world around us glistens with contradictions. Show us where you hold yours.
Submissions close April 20, 2024
DEADLINE EXTENDED TO MAY 1, 2024
Judge: Clifford Thompson
$500 First Prize
$250 Second Prize
$100 Third Prize
Submission Guidelines
- Theme: Duality
- Submission length: up to 1000 words
- Submission fee: $20
- Do not submit previously published work.
- Please remove your name and any other identifying information from your manuscript, including the file name.
- All work must be submitted through our Submittable by 11:59 pm EDT on
April 20May 1. We cannot accept paper submissions. - Winners and finalists will be announced in August.
- Winners will be published in the September 2024 Issue of Cleaver. Finalists may be offered publication.
Questions? Contact Claire Oleson, Contest Manager
Creative Nonfiction Contest Judge Clifford Thompson’s books include What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues (2019), which Time magazine called one of the “most anticipated” books of the season, and the graphic novel Big Man and the Little Men (2022), which he wrote and illustrated. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, Best American Essays, The Times Literary Supplement, Commonweal, and The Threepenny Review, among other places, and his essay “La Bohème” was selected for the 2024 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Thompson teaches creative nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence College and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. A painter, he is a member of Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City. Thompson was born and raised in Washington, DC, attended Oberlin College, and lives with his wife in Brooklyn, where they raised their two kids.
