THE TELLING ROOM'S 2025 STATEWIDE WRITING CONTEST IS NOW CLOSED.
The Telling Room’s annual creative Writing Contest invites youth from all over Maine, ages 6 - 18, to show off their writing. A panel of professional writers and youth selects one grand prize winner, a winner from each of Maine’s participating 16 counties, and submissions are considered for publication in The Telling Room’s annual anthology. If you have any questions on the submission process, please email Bridget at: bridget@tellingroom.org.
Submissions for this year’s contest are now closed. The contest will reopen in October of 2025.
To submit your writing as a hard copy submission, please send a printed copy to:
The Telling Room
c/o Statewide Writing Contest
225 Commercial Street, Suite 201
Portland, ME 04101
Be sure to follow the above guidelines, and include a completed copy of this form with your writing.
We look for writing with...
An impactful message
Creativity and originality that stand out
A structure that supports the clarity of its message
A strong voice
Elements of writing (such as setting, characters, or figurative language) that support its message
Submission Guidelines
Entrants must live in Maine.
Entrants must be between the ages of 6 and 18.
All forms of creative writing are considered, including: poetry, prose, fiction, nonfiction, screenwriting, playwriting, and songwriting.
All forms of poetry are welcome, but poems must be 40 lines or fewer.
Fiction and nonfiction prose should be 1500 words or fewer.
Youth may submit up to 2 different pieces of writing.
Submitting to our contest constitutes an agreement to be considered for publication in our annual anthology.
This statewide contest runs from October 1st through November 15th each year. If we do not receive your submission in this time span, it will not be considered.
PRIZES
The Grand Prize Winner will receive a $250 award, will be published in our spring anthology, and may be published in other publications and media.
One County Winner will be selected from each of Maine’s 16 counties. Each County Winner will receive a $50 award, will be published in our spring anthology, and may be published in other publications and media.
Congratulations to our 2024 Writing Contest Winner, Lily Jessen!
2024 Statewide Writing Contest Grand Prize Winner Lily Jessen
Congratulations to Lily Jessen of Cape Elizabeth! Lily Jessen is in 10th grade and has written and published short stories and poems through Telling Room publications, Stone Soup Magazine, Skipping Stones, Incandescent Review, and Root and Star. Her novel, The Pipe Tree, which won Stone Soup's 2022 Annual Book Award, will be released by Stone Soup Publishing this spring. When she isn’t fanatically planning the complicated plot of her next story, you can find her participating in theater, curled up with a book, or singing in her chorus.
Her winning poem “Never” will be published in our upcoming anthology in June and she will receive a $250 cash prize.
Read Lily’s winning poem below:
Never
by Lily Jessen
There are only three places
where you can truly be freed of the trials of existing:
before, after, and never,
which is a conundrum of sorts, for me.
I do not want to die, but
I do not think I want to turn fifteen
either. I want to be like a Lost Boy,
skipping, barefoot, through the forests of forever, crying
to the canopy and the crows
a cacophony of defiant eternity that echoes
across the ocean, the divide,
to creep into the mainland
and hide in fairytales and lullabies—
a protest against what seems to be
the very fundamental purpose of childhood:
to grow up.
People keep asking me: Are you going to take drivers ed?
I want to answer that I have no desire to drive, I want to fly
on the wings of fairy dust, and land somewhere
green and lush and shimmering
existing only in the whispers before bed
where I can finally feel found.
And wait a minute, where are all the lost girls, and
what tore them away from the second star to the right?
They are drawn, pulled to become mothers, and may only sit by the window
growing old waiting for either death
or Peter Pan to sweep them away— whichever comes first.
This is a poem for them, a hope that
their island will be a time capsule of the present,
without memory, only movement
through the fields and waters
on the toes of children, never to return.
County Winners
To recognize the wide geographic participation in this year’s contest, The Telling Room honored one writer from each of Maine’s participating counties as a county winner, in addition to the grand prize winner. Each county winner will also be published in The Telling Room’s upcoming anthology, and receive a cash prize of $50. Read on below to celebrate this exceptional writing from across Maine, and congratulations to these authors!
16 Counties Winners
