Lan Samantha Chang to judge First Pages Prize 2021

Are you writing? We hope so. As we prepare to open up the First Pages Prize 2021 for entries on January 1, we want to encourage you to ready YOUR first FIVE pages of a longer work of fiction or creative nonfiction to submit as soon as our Submittable page goes live.

We’re thrilled to announce Lan Samantha Chang as this year’s judge.

Lan Samantha Chang is the Elizabeth M. Stanley Professor in the Arts at the University of Iowa and the Director of leading American MFA program, the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is known not only for her writing, but her generous, insightful mentoring and teaching in the US and internationally. She is the author of a collection of short fiction, Hunger and the novels, Inheritance, and All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. Her third novel, The Family Chao, will be released in 2022. Chang’s work has been chosen twice for The Best American Short Stories. She has received creative writing fellowships from Stanford University, Princeton University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and others.

Chang will select FIVE winners from the shortlist, with $5,000 USD in total cash awards for these five emerging writers, along with developmental editing and an agent consultation.

So far, the First Pages Prize has awarded $17,300 USD in prize packages to 19 emerging writers around the world.

Check back for full guidelines to enter, and in the meanwhile, prepare your FIVE pages and mark your calendars. We hope 2021 is going to be your year of achieving writing goals and seeing success in big and small ways.

Join our mailing list here for reminders to enter!