HHKBA Submissions
Award Schedule
2023 Best Fiction (novel or collection of short stories)
2024 Best Literary Nonfiction (memoir, essays, journalistic writing)
2025 Best Poetry (collection of poems of at least 60 pages)
2026 Best Fiction
2027 Best Literary Nonfiction
2028 Best Poetry
continuing to alternate every three years
2023 Fiction Award Guidelines
Nominations can come from publishers, authors, or anyone interested in seeing a book considered. Only one book per author may be submitted.
Books must be original work by a single author (no anthologies).
Author must establish a connection to Kansas by birth, education, employment, residence or other significant claim.
Please submit two copies of each book nominated. Those books become the property of the Thomas Fox Averill Kansas Studies Collection.
Books must have an original publication date (copyright notice) within three calendar years immediately preceding the year of the competition deadline. For example, to be eligible for the 2023 Fiction deadline, the nominee's book must have a publication date of 2020, 2021, or 2022.
Previous awardees are eligible to submit a new book.
Nominations for this year's award must be postmarked or presented by April 15, 2023.
Along with a statement of Kansas connection, author email, phone, and postal address, please submit books for consideration to:
Awards
c/o Thomas Fox Averill Kansas Studies Collection
Mabee Library
1700 College
Topeka, KS 66621
2023 Fiction Award Judge
Until 2020, Robert Stewart was the long-time editor of New Letters quarterly magazine, New Letters on the Air, and BkMk Press at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Fiction he selected as editor has won multiple awards, including Pushcart and O. Henry prizes. His books include Working Class (poems, Stephen F. Austin State University) and The Narrow Gate: Writing, Art & Values (prose, Serving House Books). He is winner of a PEN USA Syndicated Fiction Prize and has published fiction, essays and poetry in Chariton Review, Image Journal, North American Review, and Iowa Review. He received a National Magazine Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors, the editing profession’s highest honor.
