Kevin McIlvoy Book Prize

The Kevin McIlvoy Book Prize

The second annual Kevin McIlvoy Book Prize will be open from September 30 through December 31, 2024, for submissions of unpublished books of prose—novels, memoirs, narrative nonfiction, essay and story collections, and hybrid works.

The winner will receive $2500 prize, book publication with a standard publishing contract that pays royalties, and 25 copies of their book. There is a nonrefundable $30 entry fee. Manuscripts will be received only through Submittable, and all works must adhere to the submission guidelines.

The panel of jurors for the 2025 prize includes James Tate Hill, Yang Huang, and Olga Zilberbourg.

About the jurors:

James Tate Hill is the author of the memoir Blind Man’s Bluff (W. W. Norton), a New York Times Editors’ Choice and Washington Independent Review of Books Favorite Book of 2021. His fiction debut, Academy Gothic, won the Nilsen Literary Prize for a First Novel. His stories and essays have been published in Lit Hub, Shondaland, Salon, Prairie Schooner, and In These Hallowed Halls: A Dark Academia Anthology, among others, and his work has been listed as Notable in three editions of The Best American Essays. Fiction Editor for Monkeybicycle, he was born in Charleston, WV, and currently lives in Greensboro, NC.

Yang Huang is an award-winning Chinese-born American author. Her novel Oasis won the inaugural Cai Emmons Fiction Award and will be published by Red Hen Press. Her novel My Good Son won the University of New Orleans Publishing Lab Prize. Her linked story collection, My Old Faithful, won the Juniper Prize, and her debut novel, Living Treasures, won the Nautilus Book Award silver medal. Her essays, stories, and screenplay have appeared in Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, The Millions, Taste, The Margins, Asian Pacific American Journal, Stories for Film, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Community of Writers. She works for the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in the Bay Area with her family.

Olga Zilberbourg’s English-language debut Like Water and Other Stories (WTAW Press) explores bicultural identity, bisexuality, and immigrant parenthood. She has published four collections of stories in Russia. Her work has appeared in Narrative, World Literature Today, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Bare Life Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Scoundrel Time, Museum of Americana, Defenestration, and elsewhere. She is cofounder of Punctured Lines, a feminist publication about literature from the former Soviet Union. Born in Leningrad, USSR, to a Russian-speaking Jewish family, she makes her home in San Francisco, serves as a consulting editor at Narrative Magazine, and co-hosts the San Francisco Writers Workshop.

Guidelines for the Kevin McIlvoy Book Prize

We welcome submissions of full-length books of prose from new, emerging, and established voices and from writers of all backgrounds.

Entries must be submitted only through our submission manager from September 30 – December 31, 2024.

Identifying information for the author must not be included anywhere on the manuscript, including on the name of the file or the title field in the submission manager. Manuscripts containing identifying information in any way will be automatically disqualified and the entry fee forfeited.

A manuscript in its entirety must be previously unpublished. It may contain some previously published portions, but it should contain a majority of new work.

Any previously published material in the manuscript must be credited in the cover letter (see more about the letter below).

Acknowledgements of any previously published material may not be included in the manuscript file. Manuscripts containing acknowledgments will be automatically disqualified.

All material must be the author’s own, original composition and free from copyright restrictions. We do not accept submissions generated by AI tools or language models.

Simultaneous submissions are welcome, but by submitting a manuscript the author is agreeing to notify WTAW immediately if the manuscript is accepted elsewhere for publication and to withdraw it from our submission manager (Submittable).

Multiple submissions are accepted, each accompanied by a separate entry fee. Each submission must be unique.

Submissions cannot be edited once they are submitted. Manuscripts selected for publication will go through an editing process with the editors.

Manuscripts should be submitted as a .doc or. docx file in a 12-point standard font such as Times New Roman, double-spaced, with at least 1 inch margins, and paginated. Include a title page with a total word count and, if applicable, a table of contents.

Cover letters must be entered into the appropriate field on the submission manager. They may not be included in the submission file itself. Submission files that contain a cover letter will be automatically disqualified.

Cover letters must include the following information

Author contact information (address, phone, email)
The work’s title, genre, and word count
List of credits for any previously published portions
A brief synopsis of the work (short paragraph)
A brief author biography that includes author website address and social media handles and, if applicable, publishing history
Indication if the manuscript is submitted simultaneously and acknowledgment of the requirement to withdraw it if accepted elsewhere
Where you heard about the Kevin McIlvoy Book Prize

Any submission that doesn’t follow the guidelines will be disqualified and the submission fee forfeited.

WTAW responds to every submission it receives through the submission manager at the email address furnished with the submission.

Thank you for considering the Kevin McIlvoy Book Prize Contest. We look forward to reading your work.

About Kevin "Mc" McIlvoy and the prize

WTAW Press established the Kevin McIlvoy Book Prize in 2023 to honor Kevin “Mc” McIlvoy. Mc was the author of One Kind Favor, a novel he said he knew was the most important work of his life. Following Mc’s unexpected passing September 30, 2022, WTAW published his last work of fiction, Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels in 2023. Both One Kind Favor and Is It So? are available in our bookshop.

WTAW will publish his only book on the art of writing, Willingness, in 2025.

During six decades of Mc's commitment to his art, he published five other novels: At the Gate of All Wonder (Tupelo), Hyssop (TriQuarterly Press), Little Peg (Antheneum/Macmillan), The Fifth Station (Algonquin Books), and A Waltz (Lynx House Press); a short story collection, The Complete History of New Mexico (Graywolf); and a book of short fictions and prose poems, 57 Octaves Below Middle C (Four Way Books).

In addition to his writing, Mc was a multi-creative and a brilliant, generous, and beloved teacher and mentor to hundreds of writers.

The inaugural Kevin McIlvoy Book Prize, decided in March 2024, attracted many outstanding submissions, four of which were selected as finalists and four as semi-finalists. Judges Nina McConigley, Joan Silber, and Peter Turchi chose as the winning manuscript THE AGE OF MIGRATION by Kai Maristed. It will be published in 2025.

In their words:

The Age of Migration gives us a glimpse into people's lives yearning to comprehend their place in the world fully. Through an array of voices, Kai Maristed evokes the universal and the unique in characters who are traveling unknown territories, both geographically and personally. These stories are full of discoveries, a book meant for the explorer in all of us mapping the familiar in new ways.
—Nina McConigley, author of Cowboys and East Indians, winner of the PEN Open Book Award

The Age of Migration is worldly in all senses. These are remarkable stories, full of beautiful urgencies, with indelible characters who get themselves in trouble all over the globe. A terrific book.
—Joan Silber, author of Secrets of Happiness and Improvement

The Age of Migration takes readers both around the world and deep into the worlds of its characters, some of whom are mid-flight, some of whom think they’ve discovered a home. They know exactly what they’re getting themselves into, until they find themselves in peril. In this remarkably wide-ranging collection, Kai Maristed demonstrates a masterful ability to imagine her way into the lives of others and—even more impressive—connect them to ours.
—Peter Turchi, author of Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

About the author:

After starting out in journalism and radio drama in Germany, Kai Maristed published in the US the novels Out After Dark (a Pen/Hemingway finalist), Fall, and Broken Ground (praised by John Coetzee), and the story collection Belong to Me (starred by Publishers Weekly). Her stories and essays have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The American Voice, StoryQuarterly, The American Scholar, Zoetrope, The Anchor Essay Annual, AGNI, Ploughshares, and The Iowa Review. She reviews books in translation and writes on French culture and politics. Kai Maristed is the founder and CEO of the global anti-poverty NGO Technology Exchange Lab.