Catherine Lacey will judge the 2026 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize

Hub City Press announces Catherine Lacey will judge the 2026 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize.

Catherine Lacey is the author of five books: Biography of X, Pew, The Answers, Nobody Is Ever Missing, and a short story collection, Certain American States. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Cullman fellowship, an O. Henry, the Young Lions Fiction Award, the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, and an award from Lambda for Lesbian Fiction. Her debut work of nonfiction, The Möbius Book, is forthcoming from FSG. A second short story collection, My Stalkers, will follow. She lives in México with her husband, Daniel Saldaña París.

This prize is named in honor of C. Michael Curtis, who has served as an editor of The Atlantic since 1963 and as fiction editor since 1982. Curtis discovered or edited some of the finest short story writers of the modern era, including Tobias Wolff, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, and Anne Beattie. He edited several acclaimed anthologies, including Contemporary New England Stories, God: Stories, and Faith: Stories. Curtis moved to Spartanburg, S.C. in 2006 and taught as a professor at both Wofford and Converse Colleges, in addition to serving on the editorial board of Hub City Press. C. Michael Curtis passed away in early 2023, and we are honored to continue his legacy of championing short story writers. This prize is made possible by a generous contribution from Michel and Eliot Stone of Spartanburg.

The Curtis Prize is open to emerging writers in thirteen Southern states. Submitters must currently reside in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia or West Virginia, and must have no more than one previously published book. The previous winners of the prize are Emily W. Pease for Let Me Out Here (2018), Ashleigh Bryant Phillips for Sleepovers (2019), Andrew Siegrist for We Imagined It Was Rain (2020), The Great American Everything by Scott Gloden (2023), and Bodock: Stories by Robert Busby (2025). Winners have been featured in The New Yorker, Poets & Writers, The Paris Review, and the Kenyon Review, among other outlets. The prize has been judged previously by Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Kevin Wilson, ZZ Packer, Lauren Groff, and Lee K. Abbott. 

The prize biennially awards $5,000 and book publication to a debut book of short fiction. Submissions will open on September 1, 2025 and will close December 31, 2025, at 11:59PM. A $25 submission fee will accompany each submission. Submission information can be found at www.hubcity.org/cmcprize. Manuscripts will be taken through online submission only. This contest is guided by the CLMP Code of Ethics.

Founded in 1995 in Spartanburg, Hub City Press is an award-winning publisher committed to well-crafted and high-quality works by new and established authors from the American South. Its books are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West.

To learn more about the prize and see full guidelines and eligibility, click here.