It’s Time to Dust Off Your Memoir and Submit to Our 2024 Prize

Every writer has a folder of at least one piece they’ve completed and have been sitting on, in some cases, for years. Now’s your chance to dig it up, polish it off and share it with the world.

Collage by Yunuen Bonaparte

As writers, we’re often shelving stories we’ve written with the hope that we’ll come back to them another time. We sometimes work endlessly on a project or a piece before a budget gets cut, a magazine folds, we chicken out in sharing our secrets with the world; sometimes it’s simply that no publication seems to be quite the right fit for the words we’ve labored over endlessly. I have a folder on my desktop called “Stories Without a Home” with a few essays and even a reported piece or two that never made it out for one reason or another — but with a little work, or even in one case, possibly no work at all, perhaps they could. Lisa Heyamoto and Laura Green-Russell did precisely that: They tapped those folders and set their work free. As a result — spoiler alert — they won Narratively’s 2023 Profile Prize and our 2022 Memoir Prize, respectively.

Lisa started working on her piece, “The Greatest Game Ever Played Behind Barbed Wire,” 12 years ago when she was pregnant with her first child and about to finish graduate school. She completed it just as her “future arrived.” And then… time kept moving. She started one new job and then another, had a second kid. “I pitched it to a few publications that weren’t a great fit,” she writes in her behind-the-scenes piece. “Nothing felt like the right path forward, and the story lingered on my laptop. So another story went unshared.” 

When Lisa learned about Narratively’s inaugural Profile Prize earlier this year, she decided to submit “because the fact that 120,000 people were incarcerated for no cause by their own government must never be forgotten,” she writes. She knew her story needed to be shared with the world. And lucky for us, and for you, dear reader, she quite literally dusted it off, submitted it and… you know this one. It won the grand prize! 

In Laura’s case, she had already written her piece, “Murder to Middle School,” as part of her in-progress memoir. But she’d only ever submitted and been published once before — a piece about her family’s horse, which she sent in to a magazine when she was 12 — so she wasn’t exactly well-versed in the process. Her writing mentor kept encouraging her to submit her stories, though, so that when she finished her book, she might have some published pieces out there. 

When she learned of Narratively’s first-ever Memoir Prize last year, she decided to throw her hat in the ring. “I didn’t think I would win, so it was easy to submit,” Laura said in our interview with her last year. But then she did win! Laura’s story won the grand prize of our 2022 Memoir Prize contest. “[I thought I] might have to submit a thousand times before I would ever get published … so winning was not something I ever thought about,” she shared. But it happened — and she didn’t even need to write up a pitch letter or sit down and craft an entire new essay from scratch. 

You probably see where we’re going with all this… Do you also have a memoir essay taking up space on your laptop; a piece printed out from an old workshop in a physical folder somewhere with just a few edits left to tackle? If you do (we know you do!), it’s time to give that piece a chance to shine. Submit to Narratively’s 2024 Memoir Prize now. (And for more information about what we’re looking for, head here.)