Contest Procedure Information:

Gigantic Sequins has always conducted its contests in a manner that is fair to all participants. Here is how the winners are decided:

1. All entries are read blind so that no one at any stage until winners and finalists are selected know the names of whose piece is being read. 
   
2. The Editor in Chief and Genre editor read all of the contest submissions and then pass a group of up to ten finalists to the judge, who reads all of the finalists and makes a decision from that batch to who the winner is.
   
3. Whether a submitter chooses to purchase the winning issue or not is not a factor in which pieces the editors select to be finalists nor is whether or not a finalist purchased the winning issue indicated to the judge when the finalists are sent.
   
4. The name of the winner is revealed so that the judge can be sure that there is no personal connection between him- or herself and the winner.
   
5. All contest participants, finalists or winner or not, are notified of the status of their submission.
   
6. The finalists and winners are announced to the public (either together, or first the finalists are announced and  then the winners are announced.)
   

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Current Contest Information:

above: Dawn Lundy Martin headshot credit: Andrew Kenower

3RD ANNUAL CONTESTS: May 15th-July 15th

Entries will be accepted only via Submittable, where full rules & regulations can be found. All entries will be considered for publication in GS 6.1.

$75 cash prize to the winners as well as publication in GS 6.1, prize packs from Small Press Distribution, Barrelhouse Books, Poetry Society of America, and Verso Books.

Judged by Dawn Lundy Martin (poetry) & Mat Johnson (flash fiction)

Judge bios:
Dawn Lundy Martin is the author of A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press 2007), winner of the Cave Canem Prize; DISCIPLINE (Nightboat Books 2011), which was selected by Fanny Howe for the Nightbook Books Poetry Prize and a finalist for both Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award; Candy, a limited edition letterpress chapbook (Albion Books 2011); and The Morning Hour, selected by C.D. Wright for the 2003 Poetry Society of America’s National Chapbook Fellowship. Her forthcoming collections include The Main Cause of the Exodus (O’clock Press 2014) and Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books 2014). Martin is also at work with Erica Hunt on an anthology of experimental writing by black women in North America and the Caribbean (Kore Press
2015). She has written a libretto for a video installation opera that has been chosen for the 2014 Whitney Biennial and is a co-founder of the Black Took Collective, a performance group of experimental black poets. An associate professor of English in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh, Martin lives in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and East Hampton, New
York.
Mat Johnson is a novelist who sometimes writes other things. He is the author of the novels Pym, Drop, and Hunting in Harlem, the nonfiction novella The Great Negro Plot, and the comic books Incognegro and Dark Rain. He is a recipient of the United States Artist James Baldwin Fellowship, The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. Mat Johnson is a faculty member at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.