This March, Agnes Scott College will host the 44th Annual Writer’s Festival on its campus in Decatur, GA. Every year the college brings in three guest writers for two days of readings, Q&A’s, workshops and a celebration of Georgia writers. Long before March, the Festival opens a call for submissions from anyone currently enrolled in an undergraduate or graduate degree across the state of Georgia. The competition accepts prose (fiction and non-fiction with a maximum of 5,000 words), poetry (a maximum of 5 poems) and one-act plays (maximum of 30 pages). The deadline to submit is December 1st 2014.

The three guest writers, Tracy K. Smith, Chris Abani, and Agnes Scott alumna Jennifer Bartell, judge the entries to announce the finalists. The judges are prominent writers across multiple genres and backgrounds. Tracy K. Smith won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 2012 for her book Life on Mars. Chris Abani is a Nigerian author whose poems, novels, plays, essays and screenplays have won him such awards and notable achievements as being the Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction in 2009 and the winner of the PEN Beyond the Margins Award in 2008 for his book of poems Song for Night. Jennifer Bartell has completed her Masters of Fine Arts degree in poetry at the University of South Carolina and has published poetry and non-fiction.

All finalists are published in the print Writer’s Festival Magazine and are invited to Agnes Scott’s campus to participate in the Festival, meet the writers and attend the workshops. The winner from each category (prose, poetry, drama) receives $500.

Submit all materials to nstamant@agnesscott.edu.

For more information on how to submit and further contest guidelines visit the Writers Festival Website.