MRBA Submission Guidelines

Michael Rubin Work-in-Progress Award: Submission Guidelines

Submissions are closed for the MICHAEL RUBIN WORK-IN-PROGRESS AWARD until Fall 2025

The Michael Rubin Work-in-Progress Award is an annual award open to students and recent graduates of San Francisco State University. Alternating each year between poetry and fiction, manuscripts are gathered in an open competition and read by an independent guest judge. The winner must be an enrolled student or recent graduate at SFSU whose work shows exceptional accomplishment and promise.

DETAILS OF THE AWARD:

An excerpt from the winning work-in-progress will published in a forthcoming issue of Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review
The 2026 MRBA will go to a fiction submission.
The winning writer will receive $750 to support them in the completion of their manuscript.

GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSION:

You must be currently enrolled as a student at SFSU or have graduated within the past ten years.
Your submission must be at least 25 pages in length, and no more than 75 pages in length.
The cover letter field must include your name, the title of your manuscript, your phone number, mailing address, email, and SFSU student ID number (or graduation year).
Your submission document must include a table of contents if there are multiple works within your manuscript.
No revisions to the manuscript will be accepted after submission.
Individual works may have been previously published in magazines or journals, but the entire manuscript, in its current state, must be unpublished and unfinished. Manuscripts that have been previously self-published are ineligible.
Manuscripts will be judged anonymously. Therefore, the author's name, other identifying information, and publication information must not appear within the manuscript. Only your uploaded manuscript is visible to the judge.

About the Judge:

Mimi Lok is the judge of the 2026 Michael Rubin Work-in-Progress Award.
More info about Mimi can be found here.

Past Winners:

2025 - Lisa Ludden Perry (Judge Elizabeth Herron)

Before 2023, Fourteen Hills published the completed manuscript of a slightly different Michael Rubin Book Award. Check out these books here.