2026 Mountain West Writers Contest
Western Humanities Review invites writers currently living in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming, or Utah to submit to our annual contest. Prizes will be awarded in poetry and prose. Winners will receive cash awards of $500 and publication in the Fall/Winter issue of Western Humanities Review. All entrants will receive one copy of the prize issue.
CONTEST JUDGES:
**********************************************
Catherine Barnett (poetry)
&
Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi (prose)
*************************************
Submissions are open from 3/1/26-4/1/26. Poetry submissions should not exceed 10 pages or 5 poems. Prose submissions may be fiction or nonfiction and should not exceed 25 pages. Entries must be previously unpublished. Previous winners of the competition may not re-enter in the category for which they won. Past judges have included Carmen Giménez Smith, Vi Khi Nao, Brian Evenson, Mónica De La Torre, Lucy Corin, Oliver de la Paz, Kellie Wells, Kathleen Graber, Ander Monson, Robert Wrigley, Edward Hirsch, Allison Hagy, Ron Carlson, Stuart Dybek, Albert Goldbarth, T.R. Hummer, David Lehman, Kevin McIlvoy, Marie Ponsot, Bob Shacochis, Timothy Donnelly, David Shields, and Bob Hicok.
Catherine Barnett
Catherine Barnett is the author of four poetry collections, including Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space; Human Hours; The Game of Boxes, and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced. A Guggenheim fellow, she received an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, teaches in NYU’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, and works as an independent editor.
Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi 
Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi is the author of The Book of Kane and Margaret (FC2 / UAP) and Disintegration Made Plain and Easy (Piżama Press). He works at Western Washington University, where he is currently teaching a Weird Fiction workshop. He is currently reading Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King.
Photo by Bob Wick, BLM “Vermillion Cliffs, NM”
