Nominations Are Now Open for 2024 Best of the Net Anthology

Nominations are now open for Best of the Net, an awards-based anthology designed to grant a platform to a diverse and ever-growing collection of writers and publishers who are building an online literary landscape that seeks to break free of traditional print publishing. In addition to poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, we will also be accepting art nominations.

Nominations must have originally been published or appeared online between July 1, 2022, and June 30, 2023. Submissions will close on September 30, 2023 at midnight.

For a comprehensive list of our submission guidelines, please click here.

This year’s judges include C.T. Salazar for poetry, Kristen Arnett for fiction, Leslie Contreras Schwartz for nonfiction, and Astri Snodgrass for art. 

C.T. Salazar is a Latinx poet and librarian from Mississippi. His debut collection, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking, is now available from Acre Books. He’s the author of three chapbooks, most recently American Cavewall Sonnets (Bull City Press, 2021). He’s the 2020 recipient of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in poetry. His poems have appeared in The Rumpus, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, 32 Poems, RHINO, and elsewhere.

Kristen Arnett is the queer author of With Teeth: A Novel (Riverhead Books, 2021) which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction, and the New York Times bestselling debut novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019), which was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She was awarded a Shearing Fellowship at Black Mountain Institute, has held residencies at Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and the Millay Colony, and was shortlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize recognizing mid-career writers of fiction. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, TIME, The Cut, Oprah Magazine, Guernica, Buzzfeed, McSweeneys, PBS Newshour, The Guardian, Salon, and elsewhere. Her next book (an untitled collection of short stories) will be published by Riverhead Books (Penguin Random House). She has a Masters in Library and Information Science from Florida State University and lives in Orlando, Florida.

Leslie Contreras Schwartz is a multi-genre writer, a 2021 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, and the 2019-2021 Houston Poet Laureate. She is the winner of the 2022 C&R Press Nonfiction Prize for From the Womb of Sky and Earth, a lyrical memoir (Fall, 2023). She is the author of five collections of poetry, including The Body Cosmos (Mouthfeel Press, 2024) and Black Dove / Paloma Negra (FlowerSong Press, 2020). Contreras Schwartz is currently a poetry and nonfiction faculty member at Alma College’s MFA low residency program in creative writing.

Astri Snodgrass is a visual artist and educator based in Boise, Idaho. She holds an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Alabama and a BA in Art and Spanish from Luther College. Studies in Norway and Argentina helped shape her interests in language, light, and perception. Her work has been exhibited nationally in solo and group shows at COOP Gallery, Mild Climate, and Channel to Channel in Nashville, Tennessee, the Fuel and Lumber Company in Birmingham, Alabama, The University of North Carolina Asheville, the Art Museum of Eastern Idaho, Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the University of West Georgia. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at Studios Midwest, Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, VCCA, and Vermont Studio Center. Snodgrass is an Assistant Professor of Drawing and Painting at Boise State University.