Santa Clara Review

Welcome to Flash Takes Flight!

We are excited to announce our second annual flash fiction and flash creative nonfiction contest for the chance to win cash prizes as well as publication in the Santa Clara Review!

The first prize winner will be awarded $200, the first runner-up will be awarded $100, and the second runner-up will be awarded $50. The contest winner will be published in the 2025 fall issue of the Santa Clara Review. All other work will be considered for publication. 

We are pleased to announce that Claudia Monpere will be the final judge of the contest! Claudia Monpere is a Teaching Professor of creative writing at Santa Clara University who earned her MFA at San Francisco State University. She was the winner of the 2024 New Flash Fiction Prize from New Flash Fiction Review and the 2024 Refractions: Genre Flash Fiction Prize from Uncharted Magazine. Additionally, her story "Solar Flare" received the 2023 Smokelong workshop prize and appeared in Best Small Fictions 2024. Her flash fiction has appeared in many literary magazines, including Split Lip, Craft, SmokeLong Quarterly, Trampset, Atlas and Alice, Milk Candy Review, and The Forge.

We look forward to reading your submissions!

Guidelines:

• Please do not include your name anywhere on the submission itself. All identifying information that is not part of the work should be limited to the cover letter. 
• Please limit your submission to 1,000 words or less (exclusive of title)
• Identify in your cover letter and on the manuscript whether your piece is fiction or non-fiction.
• Submissions will close on May 16, 2025. 
• This contest is not open to affiliates of Santa Clara University or to those who have shared their writing with the contest judge. 
• No work already published or already accepted for publication is eligible for consideration (even if revised since original publication). We consider any appearance in print or online to be a publication, including newspapers, newsletters, magazines, anthologies, chapbooks, books, websites, blogs, social media, etc. This restriction applies regardless of the size of the print run or the extent of the circulation of previously published work.
• Failure to comply with these criteria for eligibility will immediately disqualify any entry, regardless of when the ineligiblity is discovered in the process of adjudication (submission, processing, screening, shortlisting, final judging).
• The entry fee for a disqualified or withdrawn submission will not be refunded.

Welcome to Features in Flight, The Owl’s undergraduate film contest! 

Got reels? Hoping to find them a home? Donate $5.00 and submit your short film for publication. In addition to a permanent feature on our website, the winner will receive a 35mm Kodak Film Camera (film included)! 

Ideal pieces are ~10 minutes long, but films should not exceed 15 minutes, maximum. Submissions which surpass this length will not be considered. 

Submissions close on April 27, 2025, so there’s no time to lose! We can’t wait to see what you create.

Hoot hoot!

We are thrilled to announce an additional category of our contest this year, Flash In Bloom, seeking flash fiction and creative nonfiction by BIPOC, queer, and trans writers. We seek to uplift the community of BIPOC, LGBTQ, and multi-marginalized writers who have been historically underserved, and encourage submissions on multicultural and queer fantasies, futurisms, and liberations. 

The winner will be awarded $200 in cash prizes, sponsored by the Santa Clara University’s Office for Multicultural Learning, and will also be guaranteed the publication of their submission in the Fall 2026 issue of the Santa Clara Review. 

The winner will also have the opportunity to participate in an exclusive interview conducted by the Santa Clara Review and Office for Multicultural Learning, to discuss their experiences in writing and publication as a BIPOC and/or LGBTQ artist, their inspirations, creative processes, and more. 

We are pleased to announce that Kai Harris will be the final judge of the contest! Kai Harris is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the English department at Santa Clara University and the author of What The Fireflies Knew, the first fiction title from Tiny Reparations Book. Kai uses her voice to uplift the Black community through realistic fiction centered on the Black experience. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Lit Hub, Kweli Journal, Longform, and the Killens Review, amongst others. Her first short story, “The Waitress,” was published in 2017 in Rabble Lit, and was also featured as Longform’s “Fiction Pick of the Week.” Kai published an excerpt from her novel, What the Fireflies Knew in the Black Girlhood issue of Kweli Journal, and has since led several conversations on depictions of Black Girlhood in fiction. Kai’s short story, “While We Live,” won the Gwen Frostic Creative Writing Award in Graduate Fiction at her university in 2020, and was published in Guernica in 2021

Guidelines:

• Please do not include your name anywhere on the submission itself. All identifying information that is not part of the work should be limited to the cover letter. 
• Please limit your submission to 1,000 words or less (exclusive of title)
• Identify in your cover letter and on the manuscript whether your piece is fiction or non-fiction.
• Submissions will close on May 1, 2026. 
• We will not accept work that has been previously shared with the contest judge. 
• No work already published or already accepted for publication is eligible for consideration (even if revised since original publication). We consider any appearance in print or online to be a publication, including newspapers, newsletters, magazines, anthologies, chapbooks, books, websites, blogs, social media, etc. This restriction applies regardless of the size of the print run or the extent of the circulation of previously published work.
• Failure to comply with these criteria for eligibility will immediately disqualify any entry, regardless of when the ineligibility is discovered in the process of adjudication (submission, processing, screening, shortlisting, final judging).
• The entry fee for a disqualified or withdrawn submission will not be refunded.

SCU Student Submissions:

If you are currently a student at Santa Clara University, you are eligible to submit to the contest without paying a submission fee. Please email your work to santaclarareview@gmail.com with the subject line "SCU Student Submission — Flash In Bloom.