Our VanderMey Nonfiction Prize is closed.
Each year we award $1500 and publication to the winning writer.
Essay/short memoir must be 5,500 words or less
Entry fee is $20 (includes a digital copy of Ruminate)
Deadline is Oct. 27th (plus 3-day grace period)
Jasmine V. Bailey is the author of Alexandria (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2014), Disappeared (CMUP, 2017), and the chapbook Sleep and What Precedes It (Longleaf Press, 2009). She was the winner of Michigan Quarterly Review's Laurence Goldstein Prize, was a finalist for the 2018 Gulf Coast Translation Prize, and has held fellowships at Colgate University and the Vermont Studio Center. She is a contributing editor for Waxwing Literary Journal.
As with all our submissions, we highly recommend reading a copy of the magazine to better understand the type of work we are looking for.
Download a free excerpt from Issue No. 24 featuring our 2012 Nonfiction Prize winning essay: "Father of Disorder" by Jessica Wilbanks.
Download a free excerpt from Issue No. 24 featuring our 2012 Nonfiction Prize winning essay: "Father of Disorder" by Jessica Wilbanks.
Want to read a full issue?
Purchase issues featuring past Nonfiction Prize recipients:
Purchase issues featuring past Nonfiction Prize recipients:
"Without knowing where this essay would go, without knowing whether anything would ever come of this essay, it found a home in Ruminate. This is a beautiful home. Thank you to Ruminate and to finalist judge Camille Dungy for finding a home for these words. They are happy to be here."
—Jonathan Winston Jones,
winner of the 2018 VanderMey Nonfiction prize for "Bison Clouds" in Issue No. 47: Hauntings
winner of the 2018 VanderMey Nonfiction prize for "Bison Clouds" in Issue No. 47: Hauntings
Sign up for our emails, and we'll send you updates and deadline reminders:
