The theme for our August 1 – November 1, 2010 reading period is “Food.” We will accept submissions of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that incorporate this theme, as well as non-themed submissions, via our online submission manager. As always, our theme is purposefully nebulous, providing flexibility for how writers might consider “food” in a surprising manner.

We would like to thank all the writers who submitted work for our 2010 annual literary prizes: the Beau Boudreaux Poetry Prize, the A. David Schwartz Fiction Prize, and the David B. Saunders Award for Creative Nonfiction. We received many, many well-crafted and intriguing submissions, so an incredible amount of thanks is due to our judges for their careful deliberations: Kathy Fagan for poetry, David Treuer for fiction, and Jesse Lee Kercheval for creative nonfiction.

It is our pleasure to announce this year’s winners, whose works will be published in our upcoming (and relatively mammoth) issue, due out within a month:

Haines Eason – Beau Boudreauz Poetry Prize for his collection of five poems

Roger Sheffer – A. David Schwartz Fiction Prize for “Shuttle”

Eson Kim – David B. Saunders Award for Creative Nonfiction for “Fixing Everything”

Again, the narrowing down of this year’s entries was as challenging as the reading of submissions was pleasurable. If you submitted to our annual literary prize contests, we thank you for doing so and we look forward to sending you our upcoming issue.

Please note that we are currently accepting entries for our 2011 annual literary prizes. You can click here for details. Judges will be announced during the fall.

Since switching to electronic submissions, we’ve seen a spike of submissions here at cream city review, and we feel it’s made the competition–and the resulting quality of our issues–better than ever. So we were glad to see our impressions validated this week when the submission-tracking site duotrope.com promoted us to their list of 25 “Extremely Challenging Fiction Markets,” alongside such heavyweights as Harper’s, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Zoetrope, and The New Yorker.

Yet despite being acknowledged as one of America’s most selective short fiction markets, we’re proud to publish almost entirely unsolicited, unagented work. It’s thanks to all of you that this achievement is possible: our many talented submitters, both beginning and established; our subscribers who enjoy the results; and, best of all, those wonderful individuals among you who do both.