Maurice Carlos Ruffin will judge the 2024 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize

SPARTANBURG, S.C.—Hub City Press announces Maurice Carlos Ruffin will judge the 2024 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the author of the forthcoming historical novel, The American Daughters, which will be published in 2024 by One World Random House. He also wrote The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, which was published by One World Random House in August 2021. It is the 2023 One Book One New Orleans selection. The book was a finalist for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and longlisted for the Story Prize. His first book, We Cast a Shadow, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the PEN America Open Book Prize. It was longlisted for the 2021 DUBLIN Literary Award, the Center for Fiction Prize, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Ruffin is the winner of several literary prizes, including the Iowa Review Award in fiction and the William Faulkner–William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition Award for Novel-in-Progress. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the LA Times, the Oxford American, Garden & Gun, Kenyon Review, and Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America. A New Orleans native, Ruffin is a professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University, and the 2020-2021 John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Ruffin was the 2022 Grand Marshal of the Mardi Gras Krewe of House Floats and recipient of the 2022 Louisiana Board of Regents ATLAS grant. Ruffin has taught at numerous residencies and conferences including Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Maine Media, Randolph College MFA, and Longleaf. Ruffin was a co-curator of the Read My World Literary Festival (Amsterdam) in 2017 and a contributor in 2022.

This prize is named in honor of C. Michael Curtis, who has served as an editor of The Atlantic since 1963 and as fiction editor since 1982. Curtis discovered or edited some of the finest short story writers of the modern era, including Tobias Wolff, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, and Anne Beattie. He edited several acclaimed anthologies, including Contemporary New England Stories, God: Stories, and Faith: Stories. Curtis moved to Spartanburg, S.C. in 2006 and taught as a professor at both Wofford and Converse Colleges, in addition to serving on the editorial board of Hub City Press. C. Michael Curtis passed away in early 2023, and we are honored to continue his legacy of championing short story writers. This prize is made possible by a generous contribution from Michel and Eliot Stone of Spartanburg.

The Curtis Prize is open to emerging writers in thirteen Southern states. Submitters must currently reside in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia or West Virginia, and must have no more than one previously published book. The previous winners of the prize are Emily W. Pease for Let Me Out Here (2018), Ashleigh Bryant Phillips for Sleepovers (2019), and Andrew Siegrist for We Imagined It Was Rain (2020). Winners have been featured in The New Yorker, Poets & Writers, The Paris Review, and the Kenyon Review, among other outlets. The prize has been judged previously by Kevin Wilson, ZZ Packer, Lauren Groff, and Lee K. Abbott. 

The prize biennially awards $5,000 and book publication to a debut book of short fiction. Submissions will open on September 1, 2023 and will close December 31, 2023, at 11:59PM. A $25 submission fee will accompany each submission. Submission information can be found at www.hubcity.org/cmcprize. Manuscripts will be taken through online submission only. This contest is guided by the CLMP Code of Ethics.

Founded in 1995 in Spartanburg, Hub City Press is an award-winning publisher committed to well-crafted and high-quality works by new and established authors from the American South. Its books are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West.

To learn more about the prize and see full guidelines and eligibility, click here.