Sonora Review invites writers to submit to our 2025 contest: NOISE. Think noise as the unknowable and affective. Think noise as the discordant, the messy, the simultaneous, the inside and outside, the personal and political. Think white noise, cosmic noise, noisemakers, noise control, noise pollution. What floats around us, apart from and embedded in overworked signifiers and the ever-present compulsion to make sense? What breathing room does noise offer? What the hell is going on here? Did you hear that? 

Winners will receive $1000 and publication in Sonora Review. Our poetry contest this year will be judged by Dao Strom. 

Dao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of several hybrid works, including the poetry-art collection, Instrument, winner of the 2022 Oregon Book Award for Poetry, and its musical companion, Traveler’s Ode; a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. She is co-founder of She Who Has No Master(s), a collective project of Vietnamese diasporic women writers; and de-canon, a literary/social art project that centers works by writers of color. Her work has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, NEA, Oregon Community Foundation, and others. Strom was born in Vietnam and lives in Portland, Oregon.

Guidelines:

• You may submit 3 to 8 pages of poetry. Poems must be unpublished. 
• Submissions should be typed and submitted in one PDF or Word document. 
• Please make sure that your name does not appear anywhere in your manuscript before uploading. 
• Include a cover letter with a brief biography and your contact information. 
• We cannot consider work by current University of Arizona students. Please do not submit if you currently attend UA. 
• We are open to (and encourage) creative and experimental interpretations of this theme. 

Sonora Review invites writers to submit to our 2025 contest: NOISE. Think noise as the unknowable and affective. Think noise as the discordant, the messy, the simultaneous, the inside and outside, the personal and political. Think white noise, cosmic noise, noisemakers, noise control, noise pollution. What floats around us, apart from and embedded in overworked signifiers and the ever-present compulsion to make sense? What breathing room does noise offer? What the hell is going on here? Did you hear that? 

Winners will receive $1000 and publication in Sonora Review. Our nonfiction contest this year will be judged by Sarah Minor.

Sarah Minor is the author of Bright Archive (2020), Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit (2021), and Carousel, forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2026. She serves as the Video Essay editor at Brink and teaches in the Nonfiction Writing MFA at the University of Iowa.

Guidelines:

• Nonfiction should be typed, double-spaced, include page numbers, and submitted in one PDF or Word document. 
• We are unable to read prose submissions that exceed 6,000 words. 
• Please make sure that your name does not appear anywhere in your manuscript before uploading. 
• Include a cover letter with a brief biography and your contact information. 
• We cannot consider work by current University of Arizona students. Please do not submit if you currently attend UA. 
• We are open to (and encourage) creative and experimental interpretations of this theme. 

Sonora Review invites writers to submit to our 2025 contest: NOISE. Think noise as the unknowable and affective. Think noise as the discordant, the messy, the simultaneous, the inside and outside, the personal and political. Think white noise, cosmic noise, noisemakers, noise control, noise pollution. What floats around us, apart from and embedded in overworked signifiers and the ever-present compulsion to make sense? What breathing room does noise offer? What the hell is going on here? Did you hear that? 

Winners will receive $1000 and publication in Sonora Review. Our fiction contest this year will be judged by Steven Dunn.

Steven Dunn (a.k.a Pothole, cuz he’s deep in these streets) is a Whiting Award winner who was shortlisted for Granta Magazine’s Best of Young American Novelists. He’s the author of three novels: Potted Meat (Tarpaulin Sky, 2016), water & power (Tarpaulin Sky, 2018), and Tannery Bay (FC2/University of Alabama Press, 2024), which is co-authored with his homie Katie Jean Shinkle.

Guidelines:

• Fiction should be typed, double-spaced, include page numbers, and submitted in one PDF or Word document. 
• We are unable to read prose submissions that exceed 6,000 words. 
• Please make sure that your name does not appear anywhere in your manuscript before uploading. 
• Include a cover letter with a brief biography and your contact information. 
• We cannot consider work by current University of Arizona students. Please do not submit if you currently attend UA. 
• We are open to (and encourage) creative and experimental interpretations of this theme.