CCR Summer Prizes in Fiction and Poetry – 2025

Submissions for the contest will be open from May 1st to August 1st, 11:59 PM.

It is $15 to submit one entry. One entry fee includes a one-year subscription to our journal, which is normally $22. If you submit more than one entry, we’ll extend your subscription by one year.

You may submit multiple times if there is a payment for each entry. All submitted work must be previously unpublished. The winner of each genre will receive $500, publication in the Spring 2026 issue of cream city review, and an online feature on our website. One runner up for each genre will receive publication in an upcoming issue of cream city review.

The editors at CCR will read each submission, and 7-10 finalists will be forwarded to the judges for final decision.

*Current students, faculty, and staff of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and University of Wisconsin System are not eligible to enter the contest. If you have been affiliated with the university in the past, please wait three years after the affiliation to submit to the CCR Summer Prizes.

*CCR Contributors, please wait at least 2 years from date of publication before submitting.

*Previous winners and runner-ups may not submit to the prize.

*Prize winners and runners-up will receive the honorarium upon the successful completion of a W9 form, as per university policy.

*Please read the following guidelines before submitting.

Poetry Contest Guidelines:

  • You may send up to four poems in a single document. (.doc, .docx, & .pdf are acceptable)
  • Please do not include your name anywhere in the submission
  • You may include a brief, 3rd person bio in the appropriate box in Submittable
  • Each entrant will receive a one-year subscription to CCR, beginning with the issue featuring the contest winners

Fiction Contest Guidelines:

  • Please send us one short story of up to 9,000 words in a single document (.doc, .docx, & .pdf are acceptable)
  • Please do not include your name anywhere in the submission
  • You may include a brief, 3rd person bio in the appropriate box in Submittable
  • Each entrant will receive a one-year subscription to CCR, beginning with the issue featuring the contest winners

Fiction Judge: Deesha Philyaw

Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. Philyaw is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, a Baldwin for the Arts Fellow, a United States Artists Fellow, and co-host of two podcasts, Ursa Short Fiction (with Dawnie Walton) and Reckon True Stories (with Kiese Laymon). She is currently at work developing TV shows based on her short fiction. Deesha’s debut novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, is forthcoming from Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2026. 

Poetry Judge: MICHAEL CHANG

MICHAEL CHANG (they/them) is the author of many volumes of poetry, including SYNTHETIC JUNGLE (Northwestern University Press, 2023), TOY SOLDIERS (Action, Spectacle, 2024), and THINGS A BRIGHT BOY CAN DO (Coach House Books, 2025). They won the Poetry Project’s Brannan Prize and edited Lambda Literary’s Emerge anthology. Their work has appeared in such publications as AGNI, the American Poetry Review, the Harvard Review, the Iowa Review, and POETRY. In Canada, their poems have appeared in the Capilano Review, Contemporary Verse 2 (CV2), the Ex-Puritan, the Malahat Review, PRISM International, and elsewhere. They live in Manhattan. 

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