This contest is administered by the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival, an institution whose name carries the weight of a writer for whom the sacred and the profane were never separate categories. The theme "Saints and Sinners" is therefore not a prompt imposed from outside but a continuation of the festival's own lineage—a demand that writers work in the register of moral complexity, desire, and grace that Williams himself made inseparable from the American stage and page. The contest is specifically for very short fiction: no more than 1,250 words, original and unpublished. That constraint is an aesthetic one as much as a logistical one, and it should be read as such. The form rewards compression, precision, and the kind of sentence-level control that leaves no room for the merely decorative. The judge for the 2026–2027 cycle is Denne Michele Norris, editor-in-chief of Electric Literature and the first Black, openly trans woman to lead a major literary publication. Her own work has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, and the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction, and her debut novel, When The Harvest Comes, was published by Random House in April 2025. A jury of this caliber signals the seriousness of the contest's curatorial ambitions: this is not a vanity prize but a reading conducted by a working editor and fiction writer with a demonstrated commitment to work that is formally rigorous and politically alive. Submitters should understand that the winning story will be read in the context of that sensibility. What the contest offers is concrete: one grand prize of $500 plus a Saints and Sinners (SAS) weekend pass, and two second-place prizes of an SAS weekend pass (valued at $200 each). In addition, the top three stories will be published in the festival's annual anthology. The fee to submit is $10.00 USD. The deadline is October 16, 2026. There is no separate location requirement stated; the contest is defined by its thematic and formal parameters rather than by geography. Writers should treat the word limit and the LGBTQ+ content requirement as non-negotiable elements of the call, and should approach the theme with the seriousness it invites rather than as a decorative frame.