The Mikrokosmos team is excited to announce our 2024-2025 Mikrokosmos Fiction and Poetry Contest. We are looking for fiction and poetry from alumni, students, teachers, and staff of Wichita State University. Our top three submissions from both genres will be printed in Mikrokosmos Volume 71 and receive prize money based on their placement by our guest judges. It costs nothing to submit, but we will ask that you tell us how you are affiliated with Wichita State in your bio. Guidelines are listed below, as well as prize money and brief bios of our two judges, Melanie Merle and Scott Phillips. General submissions may be resubmitted as contest submissions, but please identify if your submission you've submitted it previously during this cycle (Fall 2024). The following prizes will be awarded to both fiction and poetry independently:
First Place Prize: $200
Second Place Prize: $100
Third Place Prize: $50
Fiction: We are interested in stories that excite us with innovation in form, structure, and language; above all, we’re looking for stories that connect us, touch us, and revolutionize our worlds. Experimental or not, please send us a manuscript of under 6,000 words. If you’re submitting flash fiction, include up to three stories in a single document.
Poetry: We are interested in poems that blur contemporary styles with traditional modes, poems that light up with raw energy but point in a specific direction, and poems that push through leaps of image and gesture but resound with a strong emotional core. Above all, we enjoy poems that are willing to take risks while maintaining clarity of expression. Send up to 4 poems or 8 pages maximum, all in one document. If you have a single long poem that exceeds 8 pages, we welcome you to submit it as an exception to the page-limit rule and as the totality of your submission.
Our guest judges are Scott Phillips for Fiction and Melanie Merle for Poetry:
We are ecstatic to introduce Scott Phillips as our esteemed Guest Fiction Judge!
Scott Phillips was born and raised in Wichita, Kansas and attended Wichita State University, where he majored in French Literature and also studied creative writing with author James Lee Burke. He is the author of nine novels and a collection of short stories, the first of which, the Ice Harvest, was made into a film adapted by Robert Benton and Richard Russo and directed by Harold Ramis, starring John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton and Connie Nielsen. He lived for many years in France and California and now makes his home in St. Louis.
We are delighted to introduce Melanie Merle as our amazing Guest Poetry Judge!
An enrolled member of the Chickasaw Tribe of Oklahoma, Melanie calls many places home: Tulsa, Denver, the no-stoplight town of Coalgate, and the highways in between. A winner of the James Welch Prize in 2022, her work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Hairstreak Butterfly Review, and New South, as well as the anthology, Infinite Constellations: An Anthology of Identity, Culture, and Speculative Conjunctions (University of Alabama Press).
Melanie enjoyed the privilege of working as a screenwriter for the Chickasaw Nation, and has a few short films to her credit, including two produced and directed by her son for the 24 Hour Film Festival. She was an Indigenous Nations Poetry Fellow for 2023 and 2024, and is passionate about their Language Back initiative, striving to learn her own native tongue, Chickashanompa. She serves as a member of the editorial staff for the art and literary journal Inverted Syntax and was recently awarded a fellowship with Storyknife, a women writers retreat in Homer, Alaska.