Teen Writing Contest

All contest participants must be between the ages of 13 and 18 and living in Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada.

The Teen Writing Contest accepts original works of poetry or short fiction. All work MUST be original. Use of ChatGPT or any other artificial intelligence is not permitted.

For short stories, entries must be 1000 words or less. For poems, entries must be 20 lines or less. You are allowed to submit a maximum of ONE short story and ONE poem.

Submitting Your Work

• If you are submitting a short story and poem you will need to submit the form TWICE (once for each entry).
• Your short story and/or poem MUST be submitted as a PDF via the Teen Writing Contest Form.
• Do NOT include your name on the PDF (either in the file name or within the file). We will get your name via the Teen Writing Contest Form. Any PDFs containing the writer’s name, will be disqualified.

Use of ChatGPT or any other artificial intelligence is not permitted. To ensure fairness, we use AI detection technology to review submissions as part of our screening process. Any work found to contain AI generated content will be disqualified from the contest. 

Submissions will be accepted between Monday, March 16 to Thursday, April 30 at 9PM EST through our Teen Writing Contest Form.

Judging will take place in May, and winners will be contacted in June.

Inkling magazine will be released online in mid-July.

Our panel of judges will be using standard judging criteria for each category to pick the winners.

To view the poetry judging rubric, click here.
To view the short story judging rubric, click here.

To ensure fairness, we use AI detection technology to review submissions as part of our screening process.

Judging will take place in May and winners will be contacted in June.

We will be awarding prizes for first, second and third place in both the Poetry and Short Story categories. Plus, the top 5 winning writers in each category will have their work shared publicly in our Inkling magazine.