Flash 405 is brighter than ever for June 2025! We are thrilled to introduce our incredible guest judge, Melissa Llanes Brownlee, and share her chosen theme for this round: “Illumination.”
Flash 405 is Exposition Review’s multi-genre short-form writing competition, awarding cash prizes and online publication to the winners. Whether you write prose, poetry, or experimental flash, we want to read your short-form supernovas.
Continue reading “Call for Entries: Flash 405, June 2025: “Illumination””
In a serendipitous alignment, Exposition Review marked its ten-year anniversary at AWP 2025 in Los Angeles, the same conference where we launched our inaugural issue, Vol. I: “IX Lives,” during AWP 2016. Returning to L.A. for this milestone felt like coming full circle, celebrating a decade of our literary community.
Continue reading “10 Years of Exposition Review at AWP Recap”
In her call for submissions for our February 2025 Flash 405 contest, “Anchor”, judge Ashley Moon asked for stories about what “holds you down.” We received many incredible entries, but the winners of this round held our attention down to the very last word with their complexity, their dreaminess, and their visceral descriptions.
We are pleased to share the winners of our first contest of 2025!
Continue reading “Flash 405, February 2025: “Anchor” Winners”
Spring is in full swing, and that means it’s almost time for April Flash 405!
Our 405-themed contest has historically opened the fourth day of each contest month, closing on the fifth of the following month. However, in the spirit of this round’s theme, we’re “quitting” our typical schedule and opening early! We will start accepting submissions on March 27, the same day as our our tenth-anniversary celebration at AWP Los Angeles!
The celebration will also feature readings by several previous Flash 405 winners.
Want to attend? If you’re in Los Angeles and/or attending AWP, our event at Truly LA is free!
Want to be featured in an Expo reading? Submit! Winners receive publication, a cash prize, and the opportunity to be featured in future Expo community events.
Keep reading to learn about how to submit, the contest theme, and the judge, Expo Associate Nonfiction Editor Francesca Spiegel.
Continue reading “Call for Entries: Flash 405, April 2025: “Quitting””
Exposition Review is thrilled that AWP is returning to our home city of Los Angeles the same year we turn 10, and we’d love to celebrate with you!
Will you be heading our way for AWP, March 26–29? If so, let’s party, seltzer-style!
At Exposition Review, our mission is to continue to create opportunities for our ever-growing community of talented writers and artists to share their voices and grow their platforms. This is why every year we submit some of our strongest published work for a variety of prestigious literary awards and anthologies. We are proud to present our nominees from our “POP!” issue for the following awards:
Continue reading ““POP!” Literary Prize Nominations”
As our editors are hard at work putting together our “Spring” annual issue, we are also springing into 2025 with our first Flash 405 contest of the year!
From February 4 to March 5, we are accepting entries on the theme “Anchor,” chosen by judge and Expo Associate Editor Ashley Moon. Ashley is not new to Flash 405, having curated Composition: Reach, our second chapbook comprised of previous Flash 405 winners! We are thrilled to have her now take on the mantle of judge for our February contest.
Learn more about Ashley and this round of Flash 405:
Continue reading “Call for Entries: Flash 405, February 2025: “Anchor””
We are pleased to finally share the winners of “Otherworldly,” our August 2024 Flash 405 contest. With this announcement, our Flash 405 2024 season officially come to a close, but we are ending an incredibly strong note! Overall the submission quality for this contest was very high, and there were no easy decisions for our guest judge Dr. Cecilia Caballero! In the end, though, decisions were made, and our winners and honorable mentions truly encapsulate the call for stories that contain “something a bit strange about otherworldly ways we survive the every day.” We hope you enjoy these five stories as much as we do.
Congratulations to our winners! Their work can be read below.
Continue reading “Flash 405, August 2024: “Otherworldly” Winners”
In honor of #GivingTuesday, we’re waiving our submission fees on Tuesday, December 3, so you can donate your money or time to your favorite organizations. If you’re looking for recommendations, here are some of our favorite orgs we recommend donating your dollars to or getting involved with as a volunteer.
Continue reading “Lift Up Literary Communities on #GivingTuesday 2024”
What should I read next? It’s a question we all ask ourselves time and again. Even with the countless stories, poems, essays, scripts, art, comics, and films to discover, to fall in love with or to detest, it can be a challenge to choose. Enter Expo Recommends, a curated selection of readings brought to you by the editors of Exposition Review.
Meanwhile, Expo is in the midst of our 2025 annual issue submission season. For Vol. X, our editors chose the theme “Spring,” seeking stories that well from the imagination, language that leaps off the page, writing that’s liberated from the constraints of genre and crackles with the energy of a spring storm.
Heading into the second half of our submission season (our deadline is December 15), we want to give you—our readers, writers, submitters, and community—an extra dose of inspiration. So whether you read Expo Recommends for the recommendations or a behind-the-scenes look into the preferences of our editorial team, we hope you’ll enjoy our “Spring”-inspired Expo Recommends. And when you buy your copies of the books from our Bookshop, Exposition Review gets a cut!