MRBA Submission Guidelines

Michael Rubin Work-in-Progress Award: Submission Guidelines

Submissions are currently opened for the MICHAEL RUBIN WORK-IN-PROGRESS AWARD until January 2026

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 2027 MRA 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may have been previously published in magazines or journals, but the entire manuscript, in its current state, must be unpublished and unfinished.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

Past Winners:

2026 - Antony Fangary (Judge A.M. Sosa)

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.

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Born in San Francisco, Genny Lim earned a BA and an MA from San Francisco State University. She earned a certificate in broadcast journalism from Columbia University and later worked as a reporter, producer, and commentator for CBS News. Lim is the author of the poetry collections Winter Place (1989), Child of War (2003), and Paper Gods and Rebels (2013); the children’s book Wings for Lai-Ho (1982); and the plays Paper Angels (1978) and Bitter Cane (1989), among others. Her work appears in The Politics of Life: Four Plays by Asian American Women (1993), the Oxford Book of Women’s Writing in the United States (1995), and Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island (1980). Lim is the winner of the 1981 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. In 1982, she founded a theater company, Paper Angels Productions, now known as Theatre XX, a company that performs experimental theater. Lim has taught at the New College of California, and her papers are held at UC Santa Barbara.