Gulf Coast is now accepting entries for the 2026 Gulf Coast Prizes in Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction. The prizes award $1,500 and publication in Gulf Coast to the winner in each genre. Two honorable mentions in each genre will be awarded $250. All entries will be considered for publication and the entry fee includes a one-year subscription to Gulf Coast.
The prizes will be open from March 1-April 15 2026. Guidelines for each genre are listed below and submissions will be accepted through our Submittable.
The 2026 Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry will be judged by Richard Siken
The 2026 Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction will be judged by John Milas
Congratulations to the winners and honorable mentions of the 2026 Gulf Coast Prizes, judged by Hala Alyan, John Milas and Richard Siken.
Judge Hala Alyan chose Ena Selimović's "Revolution" as the winner of the 2026 Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction. Here's what Hala had to say about "Revolution":
""Revolution" is a thoughtful and formally ambitious essay that gorgeously interlaces personal history, literary reflection, and memoir to examine displacement and inheritance. Balancing intellectual inquiry with vulnerability, "Revolution" engages grief work with precision and restraint; the result is a layered and reflective work that invites readers to consider how the stories we inherit continue to shape the lives we build for ourselves."
Ena Selimović is a writer, translator, and editor. She co-founded Turkoslavia, a translation collective and journal. Her work has appeared in Words Without Borders, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, Asymptote, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in comparative literature and has been awarded fellowships from the American Literary Translators Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her most recent translation is Dora Šustić’s Dogs, out this November from Sandorf Passage.
Vanessa Tamm's "The Waters and the Wild" and Sharifah Alhinai's "Duct Tape" received honorable mentions.
Judge Richard Siken selected Eleanor Sturm's "On the Way to Taco Bell" as the winner of the 2026 Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry. Here's what he had to say:
"This is a very stealthy poem. It starts, it seems, as a simple narrative but quickly employs meditative gestures (posing as narrative) and the plot becomes embodied and internalized. To complicate it further, the hinges—the transitions—are connected meditatively but consist of rhetoric. And the examples that support the rhetoric are images—a lyric gesture—not rhetorical statements. Three stanzas in and the poem is moving forward with four propulsions. Also there’s time travel, syntactically. It starts in the past and shifts to the present tense, then present perfect, future, past perfect, past emphatic, and the subjunctive. All of this very swiftly, yet almost invisibly. It also moves forward in two emotional registers, simultaneously emotionally distant and close. So: four propulsions, multiple tenses, dual emotional registers. Things have happened, will happen, might happen, and all of this happens in the past. This is pure magic. There are no handholds here but no one gets lost. Also it’s hilarious and heartbreaking and self-aware. This poem astonished me. So complicated and so simple. I could read poems by this author for a very long time."
Eleanor Sturm is an interdisciplinary poet. Her poetry and prose appears or is forthcoming in No Dear, like a field, Compound Butter, The Bullpen for The Lesbian Herstory Archives and elsewhere. She is a 2026 Brooklyn Poets Fellow. From the mountains of East Tennessee, she now lives in the wind.
Jeffrey-Michael Kane's "Sediment" and Polly Sawabini's "you should've seen this place" were given honorable mentions.
Judge John Milas chose Edward Tyndall's "Stag" as the winner of the 2026 Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction. Here's what John had to say:
"The writing in "Stag" operates with the confidence of a novelist compressed into the economy of a master short story writer. Every detail does double work. The heirloom clock with its mounted hunters galloping in endless circles is not merely a prop to be pawned but rather like the story's beating heart, the symbol of inherited yearning and wasted motion that the narrator carries with him everywhere and cannot bring himself to surrender. Reading "Stag" is like watching a film that could only have been made by Daniel Woodrell and Martin Scorsese working together with its feel for Appalachian poverty, shame, and dark comedy, fused with performances of bravado. What finally distinguishes this story is its ending. The narrator watches a buck moving through the ruins of the old mill across the street and for one moment their eyes meet in a moment of recognition. The narrator walks back into the Lucky Duck and sets the clock on the bar. The riders on its face are still galloping in circles, going nowhere, and he has chosen to ride along with them. It is a conclusion that refuses false hope without surrendering to abject despair, marking the work of a writer who knows exactly what a short story is for."
Edward Tyndall is a writer and documentary filmmaker whose work explores history, memory, and cultural collision. Originally from Durham, North Carolina, his fiction has appeared in The Greensboro Review, Main Street Rag, and other literary journals. His award-winning documentaries have been broadcast on PBS, screened at the Tribeca and BFI London Film Festivals, and been distributed internationally. He was the bassist for the punk band The Celibate Commandos. Tyndall is an Associate Professor and member of the writing faculty in the Department of Film & Television at the University of Colorado Denver.
Layla Sharifi's "ER" and Emily Crossen's "Hide and Seek" received honorable mentions.
Congratulations again to all of our winners and finalists!
Thank you to our judges and to all who submitted to the 2025 Gulf Coast Prizes!
Gulf Coat Prize in Fiction, Judged by Rachel Heng
Fiction Winner: “Asleep Under the Bloody Butcher Corn” by Michelle R. Brady
Fiction Honorable Mentions:
“A Picture of Fragility” by Brett Brown
“Visitation” by Vanessa Singh
Gulf Coat Prize in Nonfiction, Judged by Wei Tchou
Nonfiction Winner: “Ignoring Gevin” by Will Berry
Wei Tchou on the winner:
"The winner of this year’s nonfiction Gulf Coast prize moves like a sestina. It begins simply: a child annoyed by an annoying guy who is not their parent but must act as their guardian. The words, themes, and story then roll back over themselves in stanzas. One is reminded of a wave gathering against the seafloor, which is also to be reminded of memory’s welling. Beautiful, unlikely sentences bob to the surface: "When the yawning of the universe gets too loud, you can reshape the land with sand and seaweed, then sunbathe in cyber solitude. Maybe you’ll spot some fellow pinnipeds." By the end, the essay has evoked the pain, the desire, and the canny adolescent knowing of being collateral, of being in another person’s turbulence. Too often, nonfiction peddles in the traumatic, the extraordinary, the scarcely believable. But the best of the genre, like "Ignoring Gevin," reveals to us the shimmering emotionality of dumb crap we endure.”
Nonfiction Honorable Mentions:
“Belongings” by Faith Shearin
“A Touch of Madness” by Martha Grace Duncan
Gulf Coat Prize in Poetry, Judged by Tarfia Faizullah
Poetry Winner: “Other Lives” by Jess Yuan
Tarfia Faizullah on the winner:
"I'm moved and impressed by how this poem manages to encompass history, alternate timelines, rage, love, tenderness, family--not to mention a poetry reading, dentistry, and persimmons--all without wavering from a fiery and ferocious focus. I love the line-breaks that are as effortless as they are deliberate, and the way this poem vacillates seamlessly between observation, experience, meditation, and knowledge. "Does she also write, this other self?" is a question I will be haunted by for some time. "
Poetry Honorable Mentions:
“A Backward Look at the Binary” by Frederick Speers
“Black Stone, White Stone” by Timothy Leo