Memory is flux. Yesterday blurs from today, and today flows from all of what has been and was done before. We want to know how we can solidify memory, make it unchanging against elapsing time. Or, show us how you would discard and burn it into oblivion, where memory exists in a “could have been” or a “never had been.” Tell us about memory: what you remember, or want to, or need to, or don’t, or can’t, or won’t, or shouldn’t.
Sonora Review invites you to submit to our annual contest! Our 2026 theme is MEMORY. Winning poetry, fiction, and nonfiction pieces will receive a $1,000 prize. Winners and runners-up will also be published in Sonora Review.
Submissions for the 2026 contest open on March 5, 2026 and close on April 5, 2026. Winners and runners-up will be notified by early June!
Entry Fee: $20
We are honored to announce our 2026 judges in each genre:
FICTION
Zach VandeZande is a lapsed academic living in Burlington, VT, though he’s also called DC, NC, WA, and TX home. He’s also a teacher and an editor.
He is the author of a novel, Apathy and Paying Rent (Loose Teeth Press, 2008), and two short story collections, Liminal Domestic: Stories (Gold Wake Press, 2019) and the forthcoming Lesser American Boys (Mason Jar Press, 2022). He knows all the dogs in his neighborhood.
NONFICTION
Margo Steines is a creative writer, working in literary nonfiction, with an MFA in CNF from the University of Arizona. Her genre is a hybrid of memoir, essay, cultural criticism, and immersion journalism. She’s the author of BRUTALITIES: A Love Story, published with W.W. Norton. Her creative work was named Notable in Best American Essays and has appeared in The Sun, Slate, Identity Theory, Brevity, Off Assignment, The New York Times (Modern Love), the anthology Letter to a Stranger, and elsewhere. Margo is also a freelance copywriter, content creator, professor, creative coach, and editor. She teaches small-group creative nonfiction writing classes and seminars. Her classes are the classes she wishes she had found when she was starting out: warm, generative, and trauma-informed, with value placed on process before product.
POETRY
John A. Nieves, a 2025 Pushcart Prize winner, is a poet, teacher, and scholar. He is an Associate Professor of English at Salisbury University in Maryland where he was a recipient of the 2020 Distinguished Faculty Award. He is one of the co-editors of The Shore Poetry. He received his PhD from the University of Missouri and his MA from the University of South Florida. His poems have appeared in many national journals and have won numerous awards. His first book, Curio, won the 13th Annual Elixir Press Poetry Awards Judge’s Prize.
Guidelines for each genre can be found on our Submittable: https://sonorareview.submittable.com/submit