Quarter After Eight Writing Contests
Quarter After Eight Short Prose Contest
4th Annual Summer Poetry Chapbook Contest
Judge: Stuart Dischell
Prize: $1000, plus 25 published copies of your chapbook.
Submissions Open: June 01, 2026
Closing Date: September 01, 2026
2025 Winner: TBA shortly
Judge: Karyna McGlynn
We're seeking captivating poetry manuscripts that leave us in awe, wishing we had written them ourselves. Whether you're experimenting with form or evoking strange and mesmerizing auras, we want chapbooks that make us upset we didn’t write them ourselves. We especially welcome submissions from underrepresented groups. Open to new, emerging, and established writers. Please submit your chapbook manuscripts of up to 25 poems.
About Guest Stuart Dischell
Stuart Dischell is the author of Good Hope Road (Viking), a National Poetry Series Selection, Evenings & Avenues (Penguin), Dig Safe (Penguin), Backwards Days (Penguin), Children with Enemies (Chicago), The Lookout Man (Chicago), the collaborative work Andalusian Visions (Unicorn) and several other chapbooks, including Touch Monkey (Forklift), Standing on Z (Unicorn), and the newly published Love's Dominion (Unicorn). His poems have appeared in The Alaska Quarterly, The Atlantic, Agni, The New Republic, Slate, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and numerous national and international anthologies, including Best American Poetry, Good Poems, and the Pushcart Prize. A recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Ledig-Rowolht Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, he is a professor emeritus in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.
33nd annual Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest
Judge: B.J. Hollars
Prize: $1,008.15 + Publication
Submissions open: June 01, 2026
Closing Date: September 01, 2026
2025 contest winners, judged by Steven Dunn
Winner: Ava Stanisavljevic, "the things that give way"
Runner up: Ahmad Nageeb, "Role Models"
Second Runner up: JJ Pena, “they are always taking something away”
Submit up to three previously unpublished pieces of 500 words or fewer. Send us your best prose poems, short-short stories, micro-essays, etc. The entry fee is $15 for three pieces. Include a title page with your email address, mailing address, phone number, and the title(s) and genres of your submission. All entries will be considered for publication in Quarter After Eight. We no longer accept submissions by mail. All entries must be made online through our Submittable page.
About Guest Judge B.J. Hollars
B.J. Hollars is the author of several books, most recently Dinosaur Dreams: A Father and Daughter In Search of America's Prehistoric Past (Oct. 2025), Wisconsin for Kennedy: The Primary That Launched a President and Changed The Course of History, and Year of Plenty: A Family's Season of Grief, as well as a collection of essays, This Is Only A Test. Additionally, he has also written Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence and the Last Lynching in America and Opening the Doors: The Desegregation of the University of Alabama and the Fight for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa. He and his film partner, Steve Dayton, have also completed a documentary When Rubber Hit The Road.
Hollars is the recipient of an Upper Midwest Emmy® award, the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Nonfiction, the Anne B. and James B. McMillan Prize, the Council of Wisconsin Writers' Blei-Derleth Award, the Society of Midland Authors Award, and both the Midwest Book Awards Gold and Silver medals. His work has been featured on C-SPAN, Lit Hub, Washington Post, Star-Tribune, The Millions, and Wisconsin Life.
He is the founder and executive director of the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild and the founder of the Midwest Artist Academy, as well as a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and a columnist for The Leader-Telegram.