The North Carolina Literary Review is pleased to announce author and writing instructor Tracy Crow as the judge for this year’s Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize Competition. The annual contest is open to any form of creative nonfiction by a North Carolina writer (from, lives in, or has lived in NC) or set in North Carolina. The submission window is January 15th through March 1st.
Crow is the author of Cooper’s Hawk: The Remembering; the popular history, It’s My Country Too: Women’s Military Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan with co-author Jerri Bell; the award-winning memoir, Eyes Right: Confessions from a Woman Marine; the true story collection, Red, White, & True: Stories from Veterans and Families, WWII to Present; and the breakthrough writing text, On Point: A Guide to Writing the Military Story, in which Crow combines her skills and experience as a former Marine Corps officer, award-winning military journalist, author, editor, and assistant professor of creative writing. Her short stories and essays have appeared in a number of literary journals and anthologies and have been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. She has a B.A. in creative writing from Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, and an MFA in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina.
Crow has built a successful career uplifting veterans and service members. She is the CEO of MilSpeak Foundation, Inc., where she has built a community of veterans and service members who are dedicated to supporting the creative endeavors of the military community. She lives with her husband in central North Carolina.
“Whenever I reflect on the relevance of memoir or the personal essay,” Crow noted, “my mind flashes back to a quote attributed to memoirist Patricia Hampl in the spring 2001 literary journal, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction—“You give me your story, I get mine,” which, for me, illuminates the genre’s enduring, invisible thread that connects us to one another.”
The Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize calls for submissions of previously unpublished short pieces, up to 7500 words, through March 1st. These nonfiction pieces need not be on any particular topic, although writing related to our next annual feature (Southern Gothic NC Literature) is welcome. To submit, writers must subscribe to NCLR and either have a North Carolina connection, or the story should be set in NC. More details on the submission requirements can be found on the website: https://nclr.ecu.edu/submissions/albright-guidelines/. In addition to a monetary prize, the winning essay is published in NCLR and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Since its start over 30 years ago, NCLR has been a venue for strong creative nonfiction. The Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize was created in 2015 to honor the founding editor of NCLR. Prior judges include Alex Albright himself, Randall Kenan, Elizabeth Hudson, and others. The North Carolina Literary and Historical Association funds this contest, providing honoraria for Albright Prize honorees, judges, and finalists selected for publication.
Produced since 1992 at East Carolina University, the North Carolina Literary Review has won numerous awards and citations. The mission of NCLR is to preserve and promote North Carolina’s rich literary culture. NCLR introduces new and emerging writers; reintroduces forgotten authors; showcases work in literary criticism, interviews, book reviews, fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry; and reports on literary news stories. We complement the writing with the work of North Carolina artists and photographers.
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