Eudora Welty Ephemera Prize for High School Creative Writing - Welty Writers' Symposium

The Eudora Welty Ephemera Prize for High School Creative Writing

Named in honor of Mississippi University for Women alumna Eudora Welty and one of the W’s early creative writing journals, Ephemera, the $200 prize will be awarded to up to 5 entries. All prizewinners will be honored at the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium at Mississippi University for Women on October 27-29, 2022. They will be invited to lunch with symposium authors, receive their award, and give a brief reading. Winning entries and honorable mentions will also be published on our website. School groups are invited to the Symposium, pending COVID restrictions, and all sessions will be streamed live.

Ephemera Prize 2022 Flyer Ephemeral Prize 2022 Lesson Plan Rules & Eligibility

Ephemera Prize Anthologies

2022 Judges

https://www.muw.edu/welty/Chantal%20James

Chantal James

CHANTAL JAMES lives in Washington, DC, and has been published across genres—as a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and book reviewer—in such venues as Catapult, Paste Magazine, Harvard’s Transition Magazine, The Bitter Southerner, and more. Her honors include a Fulbright fellowship in creative writing to Morocco, and a finalist position for the Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction prize from the North Carolina Literary Review for 2019.

https://www.muw.edu/welty/Jacqueline%20Timble

Jacqueline Timble

JACQUELINE ALLEN TRIMBLE lives and writes in Montgomery, Alabama, where she is a Professor of English and the chairperson of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University. Her poetry has appeared in The Offing, Blue Lake Review, The Louisville Review and The Griot. Her latest collection How to Survive the Apocalypse was published in August of 2022. Her American Happiness won the 2016 Balcones Poetry Prize and was named best book of 2016 by the new Seven Sisters Book Awards.

Rules & Eligibility

One entry per student in one of the following categories: Fiction, Essay, or Poetry.
Fiction and Essays must be double-spaced, 2,000 words or less
Poetry must be single-spaced, 1-3 poems, 100 total lines or less
Longer is not necessarily better!
Each entry must be the original work of the student who submits it
Entries must address this year’s Symposium theme:
- “‘Telling Stories, Charting a Future: ‘Coming to the end of the road… the jumping-off place’”
- Or entries may respond to Eudora Welty’s story “No Place For You My Love” from The Bride of Innisfallen
Do not include your name on your story, essay, or poems
Do include a cover page with:
- Your name, high school, and teacher’s name
- The title of story or essay or titles of poems submitted
- Your address, phone number, and email address
Submission deadline: September 15, 2022
Submissions should be emailed to ephemera@muw.edu
Or may be mailed to:

Dr. Kendall Dunkelberg
Dept. of Languages, Literature, and Philosophy
1100 College St., P.O. Box MUW-1634
Columbus, MS 39701

Students must be enrolled at a high school (or be home schooled) in Mississippi in grades 10-12 for the 2022-23 school year. Students from nearby schools in Alabama (within approximately 100 miles of Columbus) or from a school sponsored by a W alum are also eligible. To sponsor a school outside Mississippi, the W alum needs only to attach a brief letter, indicating her/his graduating class or year(s) of attendance.

Children and close relatives of faculty in the Department of Languages, Literature, and Philosophy or of the judges are ineligible. Students who graduated high school prior to September 1, 2022 are no longer eligible.

Friends of the Welty Series

The W Department of Language, Literature, and Philosophy