cream city review 2026 Summer Prizes in Fiction and Poetry – Judged by Aimee Bender and Heid E. Erdrich!

Submissions for the contest will be open from June 1st to August 1st, 2026 11:59 PM.

The winner of each genre (poetry and fiction) will receive $500, publication in a forthcoming issue of cream city review, and an online feature on our website.

Entry:
$15 per entry.

One entry fee includes one free issue to our journal, which is normally $14. If you submit more than one entry, we’ll upgrade you to a one-year subscription, normally $26.

You may submit multiple times if there is a payment for each entry.

All submitted work must be previously unpublished.

Four readers, including the editorial staff, from cream city review will read through your submission, the 7-10 finalists will be forwarded to the judges for final decision.

cream city review does not accept (and is not interested in reading) any piece in which generativeAI or LLM models were used at any point in the creative process. 

Poetry Submission 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 Submission Guidelines:
• Please send us one short story of up to 6,000 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

Eligibility:
•  Any writer of any age, denomination or location is eligible to enter except:
• Current students, faculty, and staff of UW-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.
•  Past ccr contributors, please wait at least 2 years from date of publication before submitting to the contest.
•  Previous winners and runner-ups may not submit to the prize. Previous finalists are eligible.

 

2026 cream city review judges

Fiction Judge: Aimee Bender

Aimee Bender is the author of six books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) which was a NY Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) which was an L.A. Times pick of the year, Willful Creatures (2005) which was nominated by The Believer as one of the best books of the year, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010) which won the SCIBA award for best fiction, and an Alex Award, The Color Master, a NY Times Notable book for 2013, and her latest novel, The Butterfly Lampshade, which came out in July 2020, and was longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. Her books have been translated into sixteen languages.

Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper’s, Tin House, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, and more, as well as heard on PRI’s “This American Life”and “Selected Shorts”.

She lives in Los Angeles with her family, and teaches creative writing at USC.

 

Poetry Judge: Heid E. Erdrich

Author of nine books of poetry and prose Heid E. Erdrich is a curator and teacher. Erdrich edited the anthology New Poets of Native Nations and co-edited the newly published Boundless: Abundance in Native American Art and Literature. She served as the inaugural Minneapolis Poet Laureate supported by an Academy of American Poets award. Erdrich held the 2025 James Welch Distinguished Visiting position at University of Montana Missoula. Erdrich’s on-going project is Poetry Service Announcement (PoeS.A.) which promotes poetry as public art. She serves her communities through formal and informal mentorship, poetry interventions, and in activating collaborative response between communities.
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2025 cream city review judges

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.