The REIGN Prize 2026 Excellence in Fiction seeks short story submissions up to 7500 words. Submission window opens May 1st and closes on June 30th at 11:45pm PST.

Prepare your fictions.

$7 to enter

$777 grand prize, online publication, and print run.

$100 to second place with online publication. Finalists may be recognized online.

This year's Guest Judge is John Calvin Hughes. John Calvin Hughes has published in numerous magazines and journals, including Dead Mule, Southern Indiana Review, Autumn Sky Poetry, Feign, The Timberline Review, The American Journal of Poetry, and Mississippi Review. His publications include a critical study, The Novels and Short Stories of Frederick Barthelme (The Edwin Mellen Press); three poetry chapbooks, The Shape of Our Luck (Sargent Press), Cul-de-sac Agonistes (Black Bomb Books) and Talking to Yourself (Bottlecap Press); a full-length poetry collection, Music from a Farther Room (Aldrich Press); a short story chapbook, Voices Carry (Bottlecap Press), and five novels, Twilight of the Lesser Gods (CreateSpace), Killing Rush (Second Wind Publishing), The Lost Gospel of Darnell Rabren (Bowen Press Books), The Boys (Regal House), and The Green Man (Page Turner Publishing). Nominated for a Pushcart in 2015, he is also the winner of the Ilse and Hans Juergensen Poetry Contest and The Thomas Burnett Swann Poetry Prize.

He writes, “I’m always on the lookout for a story with vivid characters. Folks that stand up off the page. Ones whose voices are an amped-up version of real talk. I like to see them caught off guard by the events in the story and watch them deal (or not) with whatever slaps them in the face. I like a story that takes its sentences seriously, like little pieces of art. Finally, I want a story that tells me something I haven’t heard before, not wisdom necessarily, but spectacle.”