Theme

The theme for our inaugural contest is “current.” We encourage you to interpret this creatively. It could mean current events, electrical currents, ocean currents, undercurrents, the current moment, or anything else you come up with!

Need more inspiration? Click here.

Prize

We will select one winning piece and the author will receive $50 USD via a digital payment system, such as Paypal or Venmo. Your piece will be published on our website, and you will also be invited to participate in an interview for our blog!

Contest Guidelines

All pieces must be on the theme “current.” 

The Spring Contest closes on May 31, 2026.

As per issue submissions, writers must be between 12 and 22 years of age, work must be previously unpublished and primarily in English (or accompanied by an English translation), and you may submit one prose piece up to 800 words and as many as three poems up to 100 lines each—though we ask that you submit the form once for prose and once for poetry.

Please reference our Submission Guidelines page for more details.

To submit to the contest, fill out our Issue 2 submission form and select the “submit to contest” checkbox at the bottom. Please do not email us your contest submission unless you have a technical issue with the form or do not have a Google account. If you must email us your submission, please indicate that you are submitting to the contest and include your full name, age, country, and a third-person bio under 75 words.

Your piece will be simultaneously considered for publication in our second issue. However, contest and issue submissions will be judged independently, meaning that your piece could be selected for one and not the other. 

If you are selected as the winner and are unable to access a digital payment system, we can also email you an online Visa gift card, although PayPal or Venmo are preferred. As for publishing your piece, note that we reserve First Serial Rights for your work. Upon publication, however, all rights revert back to the author. If your work is reprinted elsewhere, we ask that you credit Marmalade Lit as the original publisher.