This spring, the 2026 Fiction Contest is judged by Dustin M. Hoffman. Dustin M. Hoffman writes fiction about working people. He’s the author of three short story collections: One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (University of Nebraska Press, winner of the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize), No Good for Digging (Word West Press), and, most recently, Such a Good Man (University of Wisconsin Press). He has published more than one hundred stories in journals including Black Warrior Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Ninth Letter, Witness, Wigleaf, The Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, and One Story. We asked Hoffman a few questions about how writing contests have helped shape his career, how to decide if a piece is ready to submit, and what piques his interest as a reader.

Third Coast (TC): How has support from writing contests helped to shape your career? What value do you see in submitting to writing contests? 

Dustin M. Hoffman (DMH): My first book, One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist, won the Prairie Schooner Raz/Shumaker Book Prize, and it was life changing. My weird stories about working people found pages and found readers thanks to the support of University of Nebraska Press. My wonderful agent, Heather Carr, contacted me after reading this first book, which started our partnership that I treasure. For a short story writer like me, writing contests present an especially important opportunity to support the form I love so dearly, a form that might find a harder time reaching readers if not for contests with small presses and journals. I’ve been so lucky to win a couple short story contests at great magazines (Redivider and Ninth Letter). The financial support is not insignificant, and I aimed to reinvest the prize money back into my writing by buying a ton of books and paying for submission fees and just affording some time to make more art.

So, there are very practical rewards, of course, in the financial support and audience. But let’s not neglect, too, how contests offer this incredible psychological boost. We’re all spending these countless hours rattling thousands of words into a computer, deleting most of them, reshaping the rest again and again, and it’s easy to slip into feeling like these efforts might be in vain. The validation contests offer from hardworking editors and generous judges provides that beacon writers need to keep at this, to write our next great story that might have remained undiscovered.

But let’s not neglect, too, how contests offer this incredible psychological boost. We’re all spending these countless hours rattling thousands of words into a computer, deleting most of them, reshaping the rest again and again, and it’s easy to slip into feeling like these efforts might be in vain. The validation contests offer from hardworking editors and generous judges provides that beacon writers need to keep at this, to write our next great story that might have remained undiscovered.

TC: What advice do you give to a writer who’s wondering, “Is my piece ready to submit?”

DMH: My students ask me this a great deal, and I do think this is a wonderful thing a trusted teacher or writer friend can offer: the confirmation that the work is ready to go out into the world. But I still ask myself this every time I write a story. I go through so many drafts, and that’s the place a story always comes alive for me, in the revising. Sometimes it’s twenty drafts and sometimes it’s ten years, and sometimes the stories come together like magic. I’m a fan of reading a work aloud to see if it entertains me after I’ve set it aside for a while. So much of what’s worked for me is getting outside my story, separating in some way with time or voice or audience. Failing that, I love the piece of advice from Noy Holland, “If I reach a point where I am glazing over, or replacing, one day, a comma I omitted the day before, then I let the story go, for better or worse, and move on.”

I want new. I want weird. I want the story I could never have imagined would be possible. 

TC: How does your life experience inform your reading and evaluation as you read contest
submissions?

DMH: Oh, it might affect me some. I come from a working-class background. I write about jobs and the anxiety of money a great deal, because this has been such a big part of my life, and I tend to appreciate when writers recognize this part of living in our world that works us too hard. But I don’t come to reading to relate to a work. I want to learn about people’s unique experiences and cultures and voices. I want new. I want weird. I want the story I could never have imagined would be possible. 

TC: As a judge, what kind of work do you find most often piques your interest? Is there anything in particular you’d love to see from entrants? 

DMH: I love work stories and the specialized language and secret details that only someone who dwells behind the “Employees Only” can know. I also love surreal and magical works. Maybe the secret to my readerly heart is humor. It’s the gateway emotion. If you can make me laugh first, I’m willing to go just about anywhere with you. 

TC: What book is on your bedside table right now? 

DMH: I’m always reading too many books at once. What I’m reading right now: Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. Two of my amazing colleagues’ books: Renée Branum’s Defenestrate and Allison Joseph’s Dwelling; I consider myself ridiculously lucky to be working with these geniuses. Adam Schuitema’s forthcoming novel Half a Million Minutes (it’s incredible!). And I just finished up Miranda July’s collection No One Belongs Here More Than You after loving All Fours.