Monique Truong to Judge Doris Betts Fiction Prize

GREENVILLE, NC—Submissions are open for the 2021 Doris Betts Fiction Prize, which awards $250 and publication in the North Carolina Literary Review to a short story under 6,000 words.

The deadline is October 31. Find the full submission guidelines, and submit, here.

The final judge for this year’s Doris Betts Fiction Prize is Monique Truong.

Monique Truong is a Vietnamese American novelist, essayist, and lyricist/librettist, based in Brooklyn, New York. When she came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1975, her first hometown was Boiling Springs, NC.

Truong’s debut novel, The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), was a national bestseller, New York Times Notable Fiction book, and recipient of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the Bard Fiction Prize, among other honors. Her second novel, Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010), received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and named a best fiction book of the year by Barnes & Noble and Hudson Booksellers. Truong’s latest novel, The Sweetest Fruits (Viking, 2019) received the 2020 John Gardner Fiction Prize and named a best fiction book of the year by Publishers Weekly.

Recipient of a U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fellowship, Truong has taught fiction writing at Columbia School of the Arts, Princeton, Baruch College, and Agnes Scott College. A graduate of Yale University and Columbia Law School, she is also an intellectual property attorney.

The Doris Betts Fiction Prize is open to any writer who is a legal resident of North Carolina or a member of the North Carolina Writers’ Network. North Carolina Literary Review subscribers with North Carolina connections (lives or has lived in NC) are also eligible. Finalists will also be considered for publication in the NCLR, and authors will receive $50 to $150, depending on how many stories are selected. Please do not submit novel excerpts, and stories do not have to relate to NCLR’s annual special feature topic.

For over 20 years, East Carolina University and the North Carolina Literary & Historical Association have published the North Carolina Literary Review, a journal devoted to showcasing the Tar Heel State’s literary excellence. Described by one critic as “everything you ever wanted out of a literary publication but never dared to demand,” the NCLR has won numerous awards and citations. The NCLR has been managing the contest for the Network since 2006. Select work can be read on their website, www.nclr.ecu.edu.

The annual Doris Betts Fiction Prize honors the late novelist and short-story writer Doris Betts and is sponsored by the nonprofit North Carolina Writers’ Network, the state’s oldest and largest literary arts services organization devoted to writers at all stages of development. For additional information, visit www.ncwriters.org.