The SAS Fiction Contest is an annual literary prize administered by the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival, an institution whose identity is inseparable from the city that shaped Williams and from a tradition of bold, character-driven American writing. The contest is supported by a grant from The John Burton Harter Foundation, and its LGBTQ+ mandate places it within a lineage of prizes that have long sustained queer literary voices. The 2026–2027 edition is judged by Margot Douaihy, whose Sister Holiday mysteries—Scorched Grace, Blessed Water, and Divine Ruin—have earned recognition including the Pinckley Prize, the Publishing Triangle Award for LGBTQ Fiction, and repeated placement among The New York Times's best crime novels of the year. Her dual life as a practicing novelist and an assistant professor in the Popular Fiction MFA at Emerson College suggests a judge attentive to both craft and narrative propulsion. The prize structure is deliberately modest and specific: one grand prize of $750 plus a SAS weekend pass, and two second-place prizes of a SAS weekend pass. The festival weekend pass is not incidental—it is an invitation into the literary culture of New Orleans for the duration of the festival, placing the winning writers in proximity to the community the prize serves. The contest asks for a single short story, previously unpublished, between 3,000 and 7,000 words, with LGBTQ+ content, written on the broad theme of 'Saints and Sinners.' That theme is capacious by design: it can accommodate the sacred and the profane, moral ambiguity, redemption, transgression, devotion, and the many ways queer lives have been narrated through the language of sin and grace. The entry fee is $20. The deadline is October 16, 2026. There is no separate submission link or portal provided in the verified materials; applicants should consult the festival's official contest page for the current submission mechanism. What the contest offers, beyond the cash and the pass, is the scrutiny of a working novelist and the association of a festival that has, for decades, treated Southern and queer literary voices as central rather than marginal.