GREENVILLE—The 2019 Doris Betts Fiction Prize is now open for submissions.

The competition is for previously unpublished short stories up to 6,000 words and is open to any writer who is a legal resident of North Carolina or a member of the North Carolina Writers’ Network.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.

The winner receives $250 and publication in North Carolina Literary Review. The postmark deadline is February 15.

To submit, go to https://nclr.submittable.com/submit.

This year’s final judge is Ben Fountain. Fountain was born in Chapel Hill and grew up in the tobacco country of eastern North Carolina. A former attorney, he is the author of “Brief Encounters with Che Guevara,” which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, and the novel “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” winner of the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and a finalist for the National Book Award. Billy Lynn was adapted into a feature film directed by three-time Oscar winner Ang Lee, and his work has been translated into over 20 languages. His series of essays published in The Guardian on the 2016 U.S. presidential election was subsequently nominated by the editors of The Guardian for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary. He lives in Dallas, Texas, with his wife of 32 years, Sharon Fountain.

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.

Doris Betts was the author of three short story collections and six novels. She won three Sir Walter Raleigh awards, the Southern Book Award, the North Carolina Award for Literature, the John Dos Passos Prize, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Medal for the short story, among others.

Beloved by her students, she was named the University of North Carolina Alumni Distinguished Professor of English in 1980. She was a 2004 inductee of the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.

Miriam Herin of Greensboro won the 2018 Doris Betts Fiction Prize for her story “Lucky,” which tells the story of “the protagonist Sokha’s epic journey to buy rice and a bottle of cola from a neighborhood store.”

The winner and finalists will be announced by May 1. The winning story and select finalists will be published in the next year’s issue of the North Carolina Literary Review.

Questions may be directed to Margaret Bauer, Editor of the North Carolina Literary Review, at BauerM@ecu.edu.