Sneak Peek Unpublished Writers Competition would like to welcome Fred Dodsworth to our family of judges! We at Sneak Peek know Fred as an important and active member of our local Bay Area writing community and are grateful for his experience on our team.

A long time activist, journalist, and Berkeley resident, Fred Dodsworth earned his bachelor's degree in creative writing with a concentration in gender studies from San Francisco State University last year and is now finishing his Masters in Creative Writing from the same institution.

An ink stained wretch, Fred spent most of the last 30 years in newsrooms picking fights with mayors, police chiefs, congress critters and editors. Eventually he lost most of those fights, but the notches on his belt include at least one police chief, one mayor, and numerous politicians. Now he writes poetry and fiction because there's more truth to be found in fiction than in any news story ever printed.

Let that be a hint to those who would enter our contest! Enter our Sneak Peek contest with your most truthful material if you want a shot at the 200$ first prize.

Photo above by Colin Dodsworth

Now Novel is a website and that is dedicated to helping new writers start and finish the novel that is burning inside them. We at Sneak Peek are very excited to lean on their experience in our first year as a competition. We also welcome all who are a part of the Now Novel community and program to enter their excerpts as Now Novel is helping you to make them! We are very excited to see where this partnership will take us in the future. Visit NowNovel.com to learn more about their mentorship and creative community. 

We are excited to announce the beginning of a new writing competition. The Sneak Peek Unpublished Writers Contest is for unpublished writers only who would like to show off what they are working on now! This contest is perfect for college creative writing students and others trying to break into the world of writing for the first time.

Our first contest is intended for writers who desire to be active in the lit community beyond the scope of this competition. It is the hope of the contest creators that the winner and runners up will soon have full length published works to their credit that we can link to on our site. If you run a reading series or a festival, we would love to offer your volunteers free or discounted entires. Please contact our admin Dubs at Tweetyrd@comcast.net to set up the discount.  

This is the first year of competition, so we are starting small. Please send in excerpts between 600 - 1,500 words in length that are taken from a longer piece your are still working on. There will be two prize winners.

The top sneak peek as chosen by our judge/s will receive a 200$ cash prize and the excerpt will be published on this site with links to the writers personal blog or website. There will also be a 50$ readers choice prize. Readers will get to choose from the top 5 sneak peeks entered this year by poll on our site. The other four runners up will receive free entry into next years competition if they are still unpublished. 

Entry into the 2016 competition is 10$. You may submit up to three sneak peeks, but each entry is 10$. Students who can prove they were enrolled in school on Feb 1st 2016 get a 5$ discount for each entry. We would like to encourage students (especially in a creative writing program) to submit their work before they graduate.