Our jury is looking for short stories (not scripts) with special cinematic potential. Whether you’re writing flash fiction or a novella, we want to read your story! The grand prize winner will receive $1,000 and personal introductions to literary agents, managers, producers and publishers. The top 5 finalists will be shared with our network of over 60 literary and entertainment industry professionals. All rights and ownership to stories submitted to this contest remain with the author, until and unless other agreements are made.

Grand prize winner will receive $1,000 and circulation of their short story to ScreenCraft's network of publishing and entertainment professionals. 

Heidi Pitlor

Heidi Pitlor is a former senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and has been the series editor for “The Best American Short Stories” since 2007.

Eleanor Chandler

Eleanor Chandler is an editor at Granta Magazine, a UK-based literary magazine and publisher that has published works by A.A. Milne, Stevie Smith and Sylvia Plath.

Otessa Mosfegh

Her debut novel, Eileen, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and was a fiction finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her short story Slumming won the O. Henry Award in 2016. O. Henry Prize Stories is an annual collection of the year’s twenty best stories published in U.S. and Canadian magazines, written in English.

Kirsten Reach

Kirsten Reach is Fiction Editor at the Kenyon Review. Since 1939 the Kenyon Review has published early works by generations of luminary writers, including Robert Penn Warren, Robert Lowell, Flannery O’Connor, Bertolt Brecht, Dylan Thomas, Maya Angelou, Derek Walcott, Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo, Woody Allen, and Ha Jin. The magazine’s short stories have won more O. Henry Awards for short fiction than any other nonprofit journal.

Eileen Talone

Eileen Talone is Assistant Editor at The Hudson Review. The magazine has dealt with the area where literature bears on the intellectual life of the time and on diverse aspects of American culture. In 2006, Princeton University libraries announced that they had acquired the archives of the journal, which included important works including an Ezra Pound manuscript. The Hudson Review was founded in 1947 by Frederick Morgan and Joseph Bennett, both Princeton students who were editors of Nassau Literary Magazine, and their professor Allen Tate advised them to begin their own literary magazine once they completed their service in World War II. Volume I, Number 1 of The Hudson Review was published in spring 1948.

Elizabeth DeMeo

Elizabeth DeMeo is Assistant Editor at Tin House. Tin House offers an artful and irreverent array of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and interviews as well as columns on food and drink, out-of-print and underappreciated books, and Spring and Fall issues built around idiosyncratic themes like sex, evil, and candy. Perhaps most indicative of the magazine’s mission to stake out new territory and showcase not only established, prize-winning authors is its commitment to including work by undiscovered writers.