AboutWriting Prizes

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Writing Prizes helps writers discover competitions worth entering. We curate monthly alerts for writing competitions coming up, publish practical writing advice from experienced authors, and create tools that make the submission process easier. Whether you’re a poet looking for your next publication opportunity or a fiction writer building your portfolio, we save you hours of searching so you can focus on what matters: your writing.

Subscribers

Literary Competitions each month

What You'llFind Here

Writing Competition Alerts

Our subscribers receive curated monthly digests of legitimate writing competitions coming up across poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and more. We filter out the noise and highlight opportunities actually worth your entry fee and time.

Writing Resources & Templates

Download practical templates and guides for every stage of your writing journey. Whether you’re plotting your first novel, developing complex characters, or organizing a short story collection, we’ve built resources that work.

Interactive Writing Tools

Use our interactive tools designed to solve real writing problems. Generate unique characters with backstories, visualize your story’s emotional rhythm, create image-based writing prompts, develop plot structures using the Propp methodology, and more.

Expert Writing Advice

Our blog features practical tips on craft, the submission process, building a writing career, and navigating the literary landscape. Every article comes from someone who’s been in the trenches.

OurStory

Writing Prizes started when founder Laura Mitchell spent yet another Saturday morning clicking through dozens of websites trying to find legitimate writing competitions with approaching deadlines. As a working writer balancing a day job with her creative practice, she was frustrated by how much time she wasted hunting for opportunities instead of actually writing.

She knew there had to be a better way. So in 2025, Laura partnered with developer Tom Brennan to build a platform that would aggregate, curate, and deliver quality competition alerts directly to writers’ inboxes. What started as a personal solution became a service for thousands of writers who were tired of the same endless search.

Today, Writing Prizes combines technology with editorial judgment. Our subscribers trust us to send them opportunities worth their time and money.

Meet theTeam

Laura Mitchell

Founder & CEO

Laura is a published poet and essayist whose work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Ploughshares, and Boulevard. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and has won awards including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship and the Pushcart Prize. After a decade of submitting to hundreds of competitions herself—both successful and frustrating—she founded Writing Prizes to help other writers navigate the literary landscape more efficiently. When she’s not curating competition alerts, Laura teaches creative writing workshops and serves on the board of a nonprofit literacy organization in Portland, Oregon.

Emily Campbell

Content Director & Contributing Author

Emily is an award-winning author and ghostwriter based in the Pacific Northwest. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in literary journals across the U.S., and she’s won competitions including the Bellingham Review’s Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction. When she’s not crafting stories for clients or working on her own manuscripts, Emily can be found testing new recipes, knitting impossibly complicated cable patterns, or managing the chaos of family life. She’s published three novels under her own name and ghostwritten over a dozen books across genres. Emily joined Writing Prizes to share hard-won lessons from two decades in the writing life.

Tom Brennan

Lead Developer

Tom is a full-stack developer who specializes in building tools that solve real problems for creative professionals. Before joining Writing Prizes, he spent eight years developing SaaS platforms for the publishing industry, where he saw firsthand how outdated systems frustrated writers and editors alike. He believes technology should fade into the background and let people focus on their craft. Tom holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon and previously worked at companies including Submittable and Duotrope. He lives in Seattle with his partner and their overambitious vegetable garden.

OurMission

Stop wasting hours searching for writing competitions and start spending that time actually writing. Our monthly alerts deliver curated writing competitions coming up directly to your inbox—we handle the research so you can focus on your craft. Subscribers also get instant access to our complete library of premium templates, guides, and interactive writing tools. Browsing for free? Our blog posts and writing tools are available to everyone, no signup required. We want to see you succeed.

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