Release your inner author - the next round of All Things Considered's Three-Minute Fiction contest starts Saturday, March 10th, with a new judge, author Luis Alberto Urrea. The contest has a simple premise: Listeners submit original short stories with a 600-word limit that can be read aloud in three minutes or less.
This round's special rule:
Entries will be accepted starting midnight ET on Saturday, March 10, 2012 and must be received by 11:59 pm ET on Sunday, March March 25, 2012. Selected story submissions will be posted here on npr.org throughout the competition. The winner will be announced on Sunday, May 20, and have his/her story read on-air during All Things Considered with host Guy Raz.
Urrea is a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for nonfiction and member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame. A professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago, Urrea has won numerous awards for his poetry, fiction and essays. The Devil's Highway, his 2004 non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the Lannan Literary Award.
Launched in June 2009, the writing contest has generated more than 30,000 original pieces of short fiction submitted by listeners in its previous six rounds. Former judges for the contests include authors James Wood, Alan Cheuse, Ann Patchett, Michael Cunningham, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Danielle Evans.