All About the LAURA Short Fiction Award

By Susan J. Tweit

Are you a Women Writing the West member with a flair for fiction? Do you have a story yammering in the back of your mind or on your desktop? Is there a character who talks to you at 2 am who you’ve always wanted to give voice to? A scene that nags at you?

Now’s the time to pull out that story or idea, and flesh it out. Revise it until the words sing, the narrative shines, and you are confident it’s the best work you’ve ever produced.

One of WWW’s signature member benefits, The LAURA Award for Short Fiction, opened for submissions on February 1st and is open until May 1st. Winners get feted at the October WWW conference in Phoenix, along with cash prizes, award certificates and publication in the online LAURA Journal. Not to mention the glow that comes with knowing you wrote an award-worthy story!

Here’s the Skinny:

• Your story must be original and unpublished short fiction that is NOT contracted or under consideration for publication, and has NOT appeared anywhere, either in print or online.
• It must feature a female protagonist.
• Your story must be set in the North American West, that is, west of the Mississippi River.
• It can take place in the past, present, or the future (or all of the above—surprise the judges!).
• The length must be no more than 5,000 words.
• The audience can be Children, YA, or Adult. (There are no separate categories.)

Must Do: Before entering, read The LAURA Short Fiction Award criteria and submission instructions on the Women Writing the West website. Stories and submissions that don’t fit the criteria are not eligible for the award.

Hot Tip: For the inside view of what the judges look for as they read The LAURA Short Fiction Award submissions, take a look at the detailed contest rubrics.

The rubrics cover theme (remember the story must have a female protagonist and be set in the West), characters, setting, plot, voice (meaning your distinctive perspective, vocabulary and way of telling the story, not your speaking voice!), literary qualities (language, metaphor, images, innovative ideas—please, check your stereotypes!), and technical considerations (grammar, punctuation, no excess words, healthy balance between narrative and dialog).

Use them to evaluate your story before you submit it. They’re essentially like a consult with an editor, or like taking a writing workshop.

NEED INSPIRATION?

Read the 2025 winners in the LAURA Journal.

Here are the first few sentences of each of the winners to get you in the writing mood:

“1858, Clear Fork of the Brazos River, Texas: Mucking out stalls ranked low on Rachel Wallace’s list of farm chores. Short-handed as they were during planting season, the job fell to her.”

“Moonlight, tender and warm, pressed against my tear-streaked face as I stood in the open prairie, eyes closed—next to the mound of fresh earth covering William, my husband of nine months. The babe inside my belly would never know him.”

“I sat alone at my kitchen table on Christmas morning reading the Silverton Standard. An advertisement sprang from the page:

BID A FOND FAREWELL TO THE OLD 18s!

RING IN THE LUCKY 19s!

A Gentlemen’s Masquerade Ball at The Silver Chance

December 31, 1899

8 p.m.—’til we shoot out the lights!”

“Hannah Morgan pulls herself along with the worn, redwood limb she’s made into a staff, slips from the deep-shadowed forest and eases down onto the collection of smooth rocks edging the sand. She’s been hefting them out here for years, one or two at a time, and piling them together. This evening, she adds one more to make a seat, or a throne, as she sometimes laughingly thinks.”

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Inspired? Get to work on your own story! You’ve got until May 1st to submit it for this year’s LAURA Short Fiction Award. No excuses!

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