How to Stand Out in the Bennington Young Writers Awards
A life-altering trauma can easily flatline on the page, while a petty argument over forgotten keys can haunt a reader for weeks. Good writing hinges on the choices you make. The details, the voice, the parts left unsaid—all of that is where the story truly lies.
Bennington reported nearly 5,000 annual submissions in its 2025–26 winners announcement. With that many young writers entering, advice like “be original” and “find your voice” only gets you so far. To prepare well, you need to understand the institution’s standards, read the kinds of writing its community takes seriously, and learn to recognize what makes a piece work.
If you’re submitting to the Bennington Young Writers Awards, put your energy into those deliberate choices. That’s what turns a submission into a story, and it’s what their literary community is eager to read.
Here’s where we’d begin.
First, Get the Submission Details Right
For 2026–27, the contest is free and open worldwide to grades 9–12. Submissions run September 1–November 1, closing at 11:59 p.m. Eastern. Choose one category:
Fiction: One story or a self-contained excerpt from a longer work
Nonfiction: One personal or creative nonfiction essay, or a self-contained excerpt
Poetry: One to three poems
The limit is 1,500 words total, including titles, headers, footers, and citations. Submit typed work in English. Review the current writing requirements before entering.
Seniors: allow extra time. Grades 9–11 use a separate entry form; grade 12 students complete a Bennington application through Common App or Coalition, then receive submission instructions by email. Bennington describes this process as free, nonbinding, and requiring no supplemental essays.
Every entry needs sponsor review and approval; homeschooled students need a non-parent mentor. See the Young Creators Awards requirements and FAQ.
Cash prizes per category are $2,000, $1,000, and $500; distinguished submissions receive $250. For students who enroll at Bennington, current scholarships include four years of full tuition for first-place winners, half tuition for distinguished recipients, and $25,000 annually for finalists. These scholarships are tied to attending Bennington.
Know Who Is Reading Your Work
Bennington judges aren’t checking off boxes on a standard grading rubric. They’re Bennington faculty, alumni, and students—working novelists, poets, and editors who live and breathe literary craft. They love bold creative risks, but they read with a practitioner’s eye. The contest’s criteria emphasize originality, voice, language, structure, imagination, emotional effect, and complexity. It also explicitly welcomes creative risk.
Take that audience seriously by writing for a reader who notices everything. The college’s writing programs describe a practice built around close reading, sustained work, and exchanging ideas. These are useful clues about the standards of the literary community your submission enters. These judges will spot right away whether a striking metaphor actually pays off, whether your narrator’s voice holds authentic weight, or whether an experimental structure earns its keep or just feels like a gimmick. Our advice is to prepare for an attentive, experienced reader. Treat your audience like a sharp, patient peer who expects every detail to matter.
Think about four connected qualities:
A distinct voice: The specific details, rhythms, humor, and perspectives you choose should sound uniquely yours.
Control of craft: You understand how pacing, structure, imagery, and syntax affect the reader. In poetry, that includes line and form; in prose, it includes how scenes and characters develop.
Calculated risk: Maybe you try an unusual structure, employ a tricky perspective, or open with an uncomfortable truth; this only works if you have a reason for it. Make sure the execution matches the ambition; audacious moves need ironclad follow-through.
Attention to the world: People have particular habits, institutions exert particular pressures, and feelings arise from particular circumstances; that’s how you control the reader’s pulse. Give the reader something to encounter.
These are practical ways to approach the contest’s priorities. In a nutshell, you want to surprise them. You can do that in your writing style, your structure, your details, your imagery, and plenty of other choices. Doing so, however, requires you know the rules well enough to break them cleverly.
Good Writers Read. Bennington Says So Twice.
On its MFA in Writing page, Bennington states:
“You commit as much to reading as to writing and critical literary analysis.”
Bennington understands that good writers are obsessive readers. Their MFA students devour up to 30 books in each of the first three terms, alongside analytical responses and critical essays. Students are expected to study literature closely while producing their own work. The Young Writers Awards page makes the same principle explicit: “good writers are good readers.”
Take them at their word. This is how all great writers develop their skills. Contrary to popular belief, you won’t end up muddying your own writing voice by “reading too much.” There’s no such thing as too much. By reading widely and deeply, you start to pick up a much larger understanding of what writing can do: how a story can begin, how a narrator can conceal something, how a poem can turn, how an essay can pursue a question without tidying it away.
You are very unlikely to become a strong writer if you aren’t also a reader. For a high school writer, you may need to read differently than you’re used to doing. When you’re reading to become a good writer, you want to read for craft, or with an eye for what the writer is doing in the way they create the work. When a story unsettles you, go back and figure out how. When a poem’s last line feels inevitable and surprising, trace the choices that made it possible. When an essay changes your mind, examine where the writer complicated your first impression.
Your taste will develop through this process. So will your ability to recognize a weak transition, a borrowed-sounding metaphor, or an ending that explains too much in your own work.
Bennington’s Fall 2024 Fundamentals of Creative Writing course connects observation notebooks, reading across genres, and workshop revision. They want writers who notice the world, study how other writers represent it, and put those discoveries to work.
Read the Faculty
Knowing who teaches at Bennington, what they write, and what they publish can help you understand its literary culture. Its MFA faculty directory is a useful starting point—the contest’s description of its readers identifies the broader faculty, without establishing who will judge your entry.
Its faculty and alumni span vastly different genres, but they all read with the exacting attention of working editors and published authors. Carmen Giménez is a poet and Graywolf Press’s publisher and director. Emily Nemens has led The Paris Review and co-edited The Southern Review. This tells you that Bennington doesn’t have a single winning style or one type of genre they prefer, but they do care about the level of mastery and commitment to your work your piece demonstrates.
Here are a few ways to begin exploring the faculty’s writing. The questions are our suggested starting points for your reading:
Sabrina Orah Mark
“The Evil Stepmother,” from her Happily column
How does moving between fairy tales and family life let the essay investigate feelings its narrator finds difficult to admit?
Carmen Giménez
The excerpt from Be Recorder and its author’s note
What do repetition, line breaks, and the accumulating language of labor make you experience? How does the poem enter a conversation with an earlier poet?
Samantha Hunt
The Seas, Mr. Splitfoot, or The Dark Dark
How does the writer establish credibility within an unusual premise? Track how much explanation you need to stay invested.
Hugh Ryan
When Brooklyn Was Queer or The Women’s House of Detention
Follow how individual lives and historical context interact. What does the writer need to establish before a larger argument becomes convincing?
Giménez’s author’s note offers a particularly direct example of reading becoming writing; she explains that she reread Pedro Pietri’s “Puerto Rican Obituary” hundreds of times, then developed her own response through her mother’s experience of work. Its repetition makes relentless labor audible, while its relationship to Pietri gives the voice a literary history.
Sabrina Orah Mark’s work shows a completely different path into craft. She uses fairy tales to help her think through stepmotherhood, jealousy, affection, and belonging. By filtering her personal life through myth, she opens up room to explore deep emotional contradictions that a straightforward chronology might leave unexplored.
To prepare your entry, understand how serious writers make decisions, then become more deliberate about your own. The variety of these writers should also encourage you to develop your individual interests. There is room here for historical inquiry, political conviction, emotional complexity, and imaginative strangeness.
Bennington’s literary alumni offer more directions: Donna Tartt, Kiran Desai, Jonathan Lethem, Safiya Sinclair, Mary Ruefle, and Michael Pollan, among others. These writers’ relationships to Bennington span different periods and programs. Their range is a reason to explore beyond one familiar genre or aesthetic.
Take the AI Prohibition Literally
Bennington’s rules around AI use are explicit:
“No Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools may be used to brainstorm, create, draft, revise, or collaborate in any way. Submissions that utilize AI will be disqualified.”
That language covers the process from the beginning. Asking a chatbot for a premise, feeding it a draft for critique, requesting stronger imagery, or using it to polish your sentences would all involve AI in work the rule prohibits. Rewriting an AI-generated draft yourself would still begin with prohibited assistance.
Use human feedback and your own reading, observation, drafting, and revision. The effort of finding the subject, making decisions, and working through a difficult passage is part of developing the judgment this competition asks you to demonstrate.
Plus, we assume that if you are submitting your writing, it is because you love it. What would be the point of writing if you offload the task to a robot? Wrestling with an idea, exploring a premise on your own, trying a structure that fails and then learning from it—all of this is the job of great writers. And they love it. The process should be enjoyable, even when it feels hard.
Read Past Winners With a Pencil
Bennington publishes an extensive archive of winning entries. Spend time there before deciding your piece is ready.
Read several entries across different years. On a first reading, notice your response. On a second, examine the decisions that produced it:
Where did the writer make you curious?
What information arrived later than you expected?
Which image changed meaning when it appeared again?
Where did the pace speed up or slow down?
What did the ending make you reconsider?
The observations below are our readings of the published work. They offer ways to study technique; no single winning piece establishes a formula for the competition.
Choose the Piece With Potential
Instead of worrying about which topic sounds the most impressive, focus on finding the draft you’ve written that unlocks your best instincts as a writer. Even the most ordinary details can become unforgettable when you bring sharp attention and an authentic voice to them—just take a look at Jo Ann Beard’s essay “The Fourth State of Matter,” which begins with squirrels in an upstairs spare bedroom and a dying collie, then expands into a masterpiece on grief and loss.
Take two writers tackling the exact same setup: siblings clearing out their childhood bedroom. One writer builds the entire piece around a petty fight over an old, broken toy. The second uses the process of taking inventory to reveal how differently two people remember the same childhood. The subject matter is virtually the same, but the execution—the details the authors selected, where they applied pressure, whose eyes we see through—changes everything.
To figure out which piece to submit, dig through your files. Include the clean, assignment-ready essay, but don’t ignore the half-finished story sitting in your drafts or the poem you’re secretly proud of.
Then, step back and assess what each draft could actually grow into. While a strong grade proves a piece satisfied a rubric, a stand-out submission requires a different kind of engine:
A distinct lens: Is there a specific detail, relationship, or underlying question here that holds your attention?
Internal momentum: Does something actually change over the course of the piece—whether it’s a character’s situation, emotional state, or relationship?
A clear target for revision: Can you name the specific part of the piece that isn’t working yet?
Creative curiosity: Do you care enough about these characters or ideas to sit with them for a few more weeks?
Being able to name a specific problem is a strength, not a weakness—it gives you something tangible to fix. A statement like “The second scene just rehashes the opening conflict” gives you a clear task. Saying “I’ve fleshed out the mother’s frustration, but the daughter feels flat” points directly toward what to write next. Saying “It needs to flow better” doesn’t give you anywhere to go.
Look for a draft that has a strong heartbeat and room for improvement. A slightly messy draft with real energy usually has far more potential than a polished assignment you’ve already finished with.
Final Thoughts (and next steps)
We’ve given you a lot to consider. The good news is that, if you’ve made it this far, you’ve gotten some insight into more than just Bennington’s writing competition. These are all insights students should think about when they are submitting to any competition. From Scholastic to Adroit, all of this advice will make you a better writer and increase your chances of getting your work honored through an award.
If you’re looking for more specific information on each of the writing categories for Bennington—fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction—stay tuned. We’ll be publishing a post on how to tackle each one like a professional writer.
