University of Massachusetts Press and the Juniper Literary Prizes
The Juniper Literary Prizes showcase distinctive and fresh voices and share their work with a wide array of readers. Every year, faculty-judges from the distinguished University of Massachusetts MFA program select two winners in poetry, two in fiction, and one in creative nonfiction, and the awardees each receive an honorarium of $1,000 and a publication contract with the University of Massachusetts Press.
For poetry, the judges award one prize for a first book of poems, and they select a second winner for an author who has been published previously. For fiction, the judges choose a novel and a collection of short stories. One prize is awarded for a work of creative nonfiction, including (but not limited to) essays, biography, literary journalism, or memoir.
The Juniper Prize takes its name from Fort Juniper, the house that the poet Robert Francis (1901–1987) built by hand in the woods of western Massachusetts. To honor Francis’s poetry and creative life in the Valley, the Press and the MFA program launched the Juniper Prize for Poetry in 1975. They added the Juniper Prize for Fiction in 2004 and the Juniper Prize for Creative Nonfiction in 2018.
Previous winners include the poets Lucille Clifton, Lynda Hull, Richard Jackson, and Arthur Vogelsang, and the fiction writers Terese Svoboda, Rod Val Moore, Andrew Malan Milward, Dwight Yates, and Lynn Lurie. Creative non-fiction prize winners include Jennifer De Leon and Michelle Ephraim.
For more information and for details on how to submit your poetry manuscript, please visit the Juniper Prize for Poetry page; for fiction, please visit the Juniper Prize for Fiction page; and for creative nonfiction, please visit the Juniper Prize for Creative Nonfiction page.
The Juniper Prize for Creative Nonfiction is awarded annually to one original manuscript. The University of Massachusetts Press publishes the winning manuscript and the author receives a $1,000 award upon publication.
Competition guidelines
All submissions must be made through Submittable and will only be accepted each year between August 1 and September 30 (11:59p.m. EDT).The entry fee is $30. All manuscripts will be judged anonymously by a faculty-judge from or affiliated with the distinguished University of Massachusetts MFA program. The winner will be announced at the University of Massachusetts Press website in April, with publication slated for the following spring.
Eligibility
1. The competition is open to all writers in English, whether or not they are U.S. residents. However, current employees and students of the University of Massachusetts and previous Juniper Prize winners are not eligible.
2. While submissions might span the genres of memoir, essay, literary journalism, or biography, we seek fresh and innovative projects.
3. Selections of the work that have previously appeared in magazines are eligible but should be identified in the cover letter.
4. Self-published works are ineligible.
5. Manuscripts by more than one author are not eligible.
6. Translations are not eligible.
Submission guidelines
1. Submit your manuscript online through Submittable: https://umasspress.submittable.com/submit
2. Manuscripts must be between 50,000 and 70,000 words, and manuscript pages should be double-spaced in 12-point standard font with pages numbered consecutively. Please include a title page and a table of contents. Acceptable file types are doc, docx, and pdf.
3. Upload a separate cover letter with complete contact information and acknowledgements or include this information in the cover letter field in Submittable.
4. Do not include your name on any of the pages of the manuscript file; the first page of the manuscript should include only the title of the manuscript. In order to ensure a fair and equitable judging process, please redact, change, or remove any occurrences of your full name in works of autobiography or memoir. (If your manuscript is selected, the full name can, of course, be restored.)
Multiple submissions
You may submit your manuscript to other publishers while it is being considered for this competition, but if it is accepted for publication elsewhere, please notify us immediately.
You may submit more than one manuscript to the competition as long as each submission is accompanied by the $30 fee, meets the eligibility requirements, and does not include material submitted to us in another manuscript.
General information
Manuscripts and entry fees will not be returned.
The University of Massachusetts Press and the University of Massachusetts MFA program will not provide feedback on manuscripts submitted for competition.
The decision of the judge is final. If they find no manuscript that, in his or her estimation, merits publication and the Juniper Prize, no winner may be chosen for that cycle.
The winner will be notified by the end of March and an announcement of the winners will be placed at the University of Massachusetts Press’s website in early April. No information about the winners will be released before the April announcement.
Please send questions about the Juniper Prize competitions to juniperprize@umpress.umass.edu.
The Juniper Prize for Fiction is awarded annually to two original manuscripts of fiction: one short story collection and one novel. The University of Massachusetts Press publishes the winning manuscripts and the authors receive a $1,000 award upon publication.
Competition guidelines
All submissions must be made through Submittable andwill only be accepted each year between August 1 and September 30 (11:59p.m. EDT).The entry fee is $30. All manuscripts will be judged anonymously by a faculty-judge from or affiliated with the distinguished University of Massachusetts MFA program. The winners will be announced on the University of Massachusetts Press website in April, with publication slated for the following spring.
Eligibility
1. The competition is open to all writers in English, whether or not they are U.S. residents. However, current employees and students of the University of Massachusetts and previous Juniper Prize for Fiction winners are not eligible.
2. Both novels and collections of stories are eligible.
3. Work that has previously appeared in magazines, in whole or in part, is eligible, but should be so identified on the manuscript cover sheet.
4. Self-published works are ineligible.
5. Manuscripts by more than one author are not eligible.
6. Translations are not eligible.
Submission guidelines
1. Submit your manuscript online through Submittable: https://umasspress.submittable.com/submit
2. Manuscripts must be between 55,000 and 75,000 words, and manuscript pages should be double-spaced in 12-point, standard font, with pages numbered consecutively. Please include a title page and a table of contents. Acceptable file types are pdf, doc, docx, and rtf.
3. Upload a separate cover letter with complete contact information and acknowledgements in the cover letter field in Submittable.
4. Do not include your name on any of the pages of the manuscript file; the first page of the manuscript should include only the title of the manuscript. If the author’s name appears anywhere in the file, the submission will be disqualified.
Multiple submissions
You may submit your manuscript to other publishers while it is being considered for this competition, but if it is accepted for publication elsewhere, please notify us immediately.
You may submit more than one manuscript to the competition as long as each submission is accompanied by the $30 fee, meets the eligibility requirements, and does not include material submitted to us in another manuscript.
General information
Manuscripts and entry fees will not be returned.
The University of Massachusetts Press and the University of Massachusetts MFA program will not provide feedback on manuscripts submitted for competition.
The decision of the judge is final. If they find no manuscript that, in his or her estimation, merits publication and the Juniper Prize, no winner may be chosen for that cycle.
The winners will be notified by the end of March and an announcement of the winners will be placed at the University of Massachusetts Press’s website in early April. No information about the winners will be released before the April announcement.
Please send questions about the Juniper Prize competitions to juniperprize@umpress.umass.edu.
The Juniper Prize for Poetry is awarded annually to two original manuscripts of poems: one first book prize for a previously unpublished author and one prize for a previously published author. The University of Massachusetts Press publishes the winning manuscripts and the authors receive a $1,000 award upon publication.
Competition guidelines
All submissions must be made through Submittable and will only be accepted each year between August 1 and September 30 (11:59p.m. EDT).The entry fee is $30. All manuscripts will be judged anonymously by a faculty-judge from or affiliated with the distinguished University of Massachusetts MFA program. The winners will be announced at the University of Massachusetts Press website in April, with publication slated for the following spring.
Eligibility
1. The competition is open to all writers in English, whether or not they are U.S. residents. However, current employees and students of the University of Massachusetts and previous Juniper Prize for Poetry winners are not eligible.
2. Manuscripts by more than one author are not eligible.
3. Translations are not eligible.
4. Chapbooks are not eligible. If your manuscript is derived from a chapbook, please ensure that the Juniper submission is significantly different from the chapbook.
5. Collected works of previously published poems are not eligible.
Submission guidelines
1. Submit your manuscript online through Submittable: https://umasspress.submittable.com/submit
2. Manuscript files must be between 60 and 95 pages in 12-point, standard font, with pages numbered consecutively. Please include a title page and a table of contents; those pages do count towards your total page count.
3. Do not include your name on any of the pages of the manuscript file. The first page of the manuscript should include only the title of the manuscript. The first page of the manuscript should include only the title of the manuscript.If the author’s name appears anywhere in the file, the submission will be disqualified.
4. Upload a separate cover letter with complete contact information and acknowledgements in the cover letter field in Submittable. Acknowledgements should include credits for all poems previously published elsewhere.
Multiple submissions
You may submit your manuscript to other publishers while it is being considered for this competition, but if it is accepted for publication elsewhere, please notify us immediately.
You may submit more than one manuscript to the competition as long as each submission is accompanied by the $30 fee, meets the eligibility requirements, and does not include material submitted to us in another manuscript.
General information
Manuscripts and entry fees will not be returned.
The University of Massachusetts Press and the University of Massachusetts MFA program will not provide feedback on manuscripts submitted for competition.
The decision of the judge is final. If they find no manuscript that, in their estimation, merits publication and the Juniper Prize, no winner may be chosen for that cycle.
The winners will be notified by the end of March and an announcement of the winners will be placed at the University of Massachusetts Press’s website in early April. No information about the winners will be released before the April announcement.
Please send questions about the Juniper Prize competitions to juniperprize@umpress.umass.edu.