We are excited to announce these shortlisted finalists for our 2025 Susan Neville Fiction and Poetry Contests:
Shortlisted Fiction
The Wind in the Aspen Tree, Tom Howard
The Last Bayog, John Alfred Luarca
Desperate Women, Ananya Pandya
The Academy, Annie Raab
Shortlisted Poems
Dooms(crolling)day, Erica Abbott
The Night We Quit Believing, Alex Dodt
Raising the Night Fields, Daniel Lurie
All the Windows, Kevin McLellan
Essential maxims for Husbandry, Anna Newman
Calendar Year, 1963, Matthew Zhao
Our winners will be announced in late March.
Booth invites submissions for the inaugural Susan Neville Prizes in Fiction and Poetry. Winners will be announced in April 2026.
Fiction Prize: $1,000 + publication
Poetry Prize: $1,000 + publication
Entry Fee: $20. Includes a two-issue subscription to Booth.
Guest Judges: Kaveh Akbar and Paige Lewis. Kaveh and Paige will collaborate on judging both Fiction and Poetry.
Submissions open from October 1, 2025 – December 31, 2025
Guidelines:
- Multiple submissions are welcome, but each submission carries its own contest submission fee.
- Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please withdraw any contest entries if your piece is accepted elsewhere.
- All entries must be previously unpublished.
- All previous winners of the Booth Prize and all current Butler students and faculty are ineligible. Former students of the Butler University MFA program are also ineligible.
- Fiction - No more than 7,500 words.
- Poetry - Up to three poems totaling no more than fifteen pages.
All submissions considered for publication. Send any questions to us at booth@butler.edu.
See our Submittable page starting October 1 to enter.
Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear in the New Yorker, New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf 2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James 2017), in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry 2016). He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine (Penguin Classics 2022). Martyr! (Knopf, 2024), Kaveh’s first novel, was a New York Times Bestseller, the 2024 recipient of the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize for Fiction, a 2024 Discover Prize Finalist, and a 2024 National Book Award Finalist.
In 2020 Kaveh was named Poetry Editor of The Nation. The recipient of honors including multiple Pushcart Prizes, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, and the Levis Reading Prize, Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and teaches at the University of Iowa and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson. In 2014, Kaveh founded Divedapper, a home for dialogues with the most vital voices in American poetry. With Sarah Kay and Claire Schwartz, he wrote a weekly column for the Paris Review called “Poetry RX.”
Paige Lewis is the author of the poetry collection Space Struck and coeditor of Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance. Lewis's debut novel, Canon, will be published by Viking Press / Penguin in 2026. Lewis teaches at the University of Iowa.