STREETLIGHT’S 2022 SUMMER FLASH FICTION CONTEST Send us your shorts by July 11! 1st Prize — $125 2nd — $75 3rd — $50 Entry Fee: $10 CONTEST GUIDELINES: Up to 500 of your best, previously unpublished words. Any subject. Multiple submissions are fine — one work per entry. This is a blind contest. Please remove all personal information from the story pages. We encourage simultaneous submissions but if your piece is accepted elsewhere, inform us at fiction@streetlightmag.com, right away. Contest deadline is Monday, July 11, 2022 midnight EST. Competition winners will be announced July 25, … Continue reading 2022 Essay/Memoir Contest→
STREETLIGHT’S 2022 SUMMER FLASH FICTION CONTEST Send us your shorts by July 11! 1st Prize — $125 2nd — $75 3rd — $50 Entry Fee: $10 CONTEST GUIDELINES: Up to 500 of your best, previously unpublished words. Any subject. Multiple submissions are fine — one work per entry. This is a blind contest. Please remove all personal information from the story pages. We encourage simultaneous submissions but if your piece is accepted elsewhere, inform us at fiction@streetlightmag.com, right away. Contest deadline is Monday, July 11, 2022 midnight EST. Competition winners will be announced July 25, … Continue reading 2022 Flash Fiction Contest→
STREETLIGHT’S 2022 POETRY CONTEST August 15 to October 31 1st Prize — $125 2nd — $75 3rd — $50 Entry Fee: $10 FOR UP TO 3 POEMS CONTEST GUIDELINES: Up to three of your best, previously unpublished poems. Any subject. Multiple submissions are fine. This is a blind contest. Please remove all personal information from the story pages. We encourage simultaneous submissions but if your piece is accepted elsewhere, inform us at poetry1@streetlightmag.com or poetry2@streetlightmag.com, right away. Contest deadline is Monday, October 31, 2022 midnight EST. Competition winners will be announced November 14, 2022. Only … Continue reading 2022 Poetry Contest→
This year’s flash fiction contest brought many great stories . . . and hard choices. (Seriously, it’s no lay-up trying to determine a winner when you have two judges with different writing backgrounds and sensibilities looking for the top three entries!) But Mary Esselman and I dove into the stack, read and reread, then ranked those that spoke to us in order, finding overlap à la Venn Diagram. (Personal aside: I’m always intrigued by the fact that this formula may mean one’s favorite might not even make the cut at all.) That said, the … Continue reading 2022 Flash Fiction Contest Winners by Erika Raskin and Mary Esselman→
Vigil Outside the nurses’ station, third floor east, twilight spreads its white canopy over the busy avenue of bright buildings. Down the hall, an orderly lofts a pale sheet over a vacant bed. In the next room, the ventilator pulses on, pushing a steady breeze through the cracked wall of a failing lung. In the dim light, the old woman tethered to a fever floats under the fluorescent aura shimmering above her head. Beneath shuttered eyelids, night pools. Right up to the edge. Work Gloves Nothing much to look at lying on the shelf, one … Continue reading Vigil and Work Gloves, 2 poems by Ron Stottlemyer→
I wholeheartedly believe in the power and value of art—whatever the avenue. The act of trying is the underlying variable of my art education, from solely writing poetry to putting energy towards visual poetry, drawing and collaging. My collages are made from cut paper and pen, followed by photographing (digitizing), digitally manipulating and modifying to add more elements. For art/drawing, my informal education originates from being influenced by creative friends in college. Being in the same space and sharing each other’s creative projects is still motivational. There is power in collective energy. I’ve … Continue reading Drawings and Collages by Jack C. Buck→
Erik awakens full of pain, lying in a hospital bed in a propped position, his throat sore from the tube that snaked down into his mouth and nose, his limbs heavy and bruised. His head feels like it belongs to someone else. The lights are low in his hospital room and he hears the soft whir of machines. No one is in the room with him that he can see. Panic floods his heart as he remembers the accident: the whirl of lights, the spinning crush of metal. And ten-year-old George, his son, in … Continue reading Erik and George by Ty Phelps→
Was I crazy to want to attend two different public events on a single hot summer’s day? Maybe, but after two years of the Covid pandemic, there were a couple of Fourth of July events I really wanted to attend. The first was two events in one: the July Fourth Independence Day Celebration and Naturalization Ceremony at Monticello, which is the historic home of President Thomas Jefferson, located just outside of Charlottesville. And this year, I actually knew someone who was taking the oath of citizenship, a woman who goes to the same church we … Continue reading A Special Day by Miles Fowler→
Catherine Pritchard Childress is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight’s 2022 Essay/Memoir Contest Offering food as a form of comfort for those in mourning is as much a part of my Appalachian upbringing as Vacation Bible School and dinner on the grounds. Where there is death there will be cream soup casseroles and fried chicken, jugs of sweet tea and deli trays. Condolences unaccompanied by a Pyrex dish (name written on masking tape and secured to the bottom) or a lidded Rubbermaid container (“Honey, I don’t need it back”) are lacking—or so we’ve been raised … Continue reading Pandemic Casserole by Catherine Pritchard Childress→
Cottonmouth As the boat eased out on the pond, there was just enough light to see pale ribbons of sky rippling in the water. Dad paddled ahead with slow, heavy strokes, but the lives watching from trees, listening in the grass knew what had just arrived. As he rested the paddle on his knees, the boat glided on as if it knew where it was going, pulling a wide scarf of quiet behind it. Then the first deep croak sounded in duckweed near the far bank. When he dipped the paddle over the side to … Continue reading Cottonmouth by Ron Stottlemyer→
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