Lazuli Literary Group Summer 2025 Writing Contest

Guidelines

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We love work that is linguistically, intellectually, and emotionally demanding of the reader.  We want art that grows in complexity upon each visitation; we enjoy ornate, cerebral, and voluptuous phrases executed with thematic intent. Some writers whose work we admire are Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Jorge Luis Borges, Charles Dickens, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Robert Musil, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Milton, Aphra Behn, Herman Melville, and Italo Calvino.

Read more about our aesthetic inclinations here.

LAZULI LITERARY GROUP WRITING CONTEST - SUMMER 2025

$500 Prize + publication

​LOGISTICS

• Deadline: July 15, 2025 (midnight ET)
• Submission fee: $15*
  • *A philosophical note that you can skip reading but that we feel compelled to share, as per our mission: We are coming up on a decade of running this small press, and it is most accurately described as a labor of love. Much of what keeps us going and allows us to pay at least 2-3 writers (under the schema of "contest winners") per year is the financial support you provide us with this fee, so if this amount is something you are in a position to spare and give, please know that we consider this a vote of support for our projects and are sincerely grateful. And if the fee is untenable for you at the moment, we still want to read your work; our goal is to amplify compatible voices and aesthetics to whatever extent we can, outside the realm of capitalism. To skirt the fee, please take advantage of our FREE (but unpaid) general submissions portal, and perhaps we can humbly offer a place for your literature to live. Here at Lazuli Literary "Group", let's forge ahead as fellow readers and writers! One day, if ever we are in a position to pay all of our writers what writers deserve, we will. ​

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AESTHETICS

• Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essays, philosophical ruminations, experimental pieces, stage plays, fragments, and excerpts are all acceptable. We are not concerned with genre distinctions—send us the best you have; we want only for it to be thoughtful, intelligent, and beautiful. All writers tend to develop a scrap heap of brilliant writing - sharp dialogue that has been cut in service of a plot, a philosophical tirade that can't quite be couched in a narrative, a stunning imagistic landscape of linguistic pyrotechnics that deserves an audience... Literary beauty exists in more than the conventional narrative, we believe, and the most cerebral moments cannot necessarily be expressed in more than bursts and fragments. We would love to provide a space for those portions of works that have been cut away through no fault of their own.

SUBMISSIONS

• You may submit multiple pieces as long as each is accompanied by a separate entry fee. One poetry submission may include up to 5 unrelated (or related) poems.
• Page limit for any type of submission: 150 pages. 
• We  may choose to award the prize to all or part of each submission (that is, we might choose one poem from a submitted set or one chapter of a novella, for example). The selected portions of the winning entry will be published online in AZURE: A Journal of Literary Thought and will be considered for publication in our print anthology. An excerpt from this piece will appear on the contest page.
• We will award as many first place prizes as the top submissions warrant--that is, if multiple pieces dazzle us equally, each chosen entrant will receive $500. To us, the contest is not about awarding a "winner"; it is about paying writers whom we wish to publish, using a "contest" as an avenue to do so. 

ELIGIBILITY

• Both previously published and unpublished works are eligible, provided that potential publication in AZURE: A Journal of Literary Thought does not infringe on previously held rights.
• Simultaneous submissions are fine, even encouraged--your work deserves its due! If your work is published elsewhere before the end of our judging period, you are still eligible for the prize money, so you may choose to leave your work under consideration provided that you will allow us to publish a short excerpt from your piece on our website (we are also happy to link to the publication where the entire work can be found).
• Works previously published in AZURE: A Journal of Literary Thought are not eligible, but an author whose work we have previously published may submit a new work for consideration.​
• If you have previously been the winner of a Lazuli Literary Group Writing Contest, you are not eligible to submit.
• You may not submit pages that have been workshopped (or the product of pages that have been workshopped) with an editor of AZURE, but you CAN submit other pages from the same piece (for example, if you workshopped only Chapter 1 of a novel, you may still submit Chapter 8 to the contest; in this case, you MUST remove Chapter 1 from the submitted document).
• We DO NOT accept translations or AI-generated work. (If you have questions about the eligibility of your piece on this count, please contact us before you submit. We only permit the use of AI for factual-type research that manifests in your OWN words in the final product; forbidden uses of AI comprise just about everything else: We do not accept pieces for which AI was used to generate ideas, help with structure, polish language, etc.).

JUDGING

• All submissions are read blind (without knowledge of the author's name or background information). Please do not include any identifying information on your submitted document.
• The winning submission(s) will be selected by Sakina B. Fakhri, the editor of AZURE: A Journal of Literary Thought.
• A cover letter is not required and will not affect the success of your submission, but please include a short bio that we can use in the event of publication. 

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