Win $1,000 in Professional Editing
- Jun 1, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: Dec 3, 2025
The #ForThePeople series is now accepting submissions of nonfiction stories, essays, poems, and visual works from June 2025 through June 2026. Eligible entries must address urgent real-world issues, including civil rights violations, injustices in deportation, protest suppression, systemic inequality, or abuses of power. Submissions must be original, truthful, and unpublished unless otherwise disclosed. One contributor will be awarded $1,000 in professional editing services, including developmental editing, manuscript reviews, query and proposal support, line editing, and one-on-one coaching. This initiative is designed to elevate voices that are too often silenced and to bring their experiences into the public record with professional support.
For The Writers is now accepting submissions for the #ForThePeople series from June 1 through July 31, 2026. One contributor will receive $1,000 in professional editing services, awarded in recognition of work that demonstrates exceptional command of personal narrative under pressure.
We seek accounts grounded in lived experience during moments when public systems fracture and private lives bear the consequences. These may come from border crossings that unravel without warning, deportations carried out in silence, protests that alter the course of a household, or institutions that fail precisely when reliance is highest. We also invite testimony from Gaza and other communities where loss accumulates faster than documentation can keep up, and where the effort to record what happened becomes an act of resistance in its own right.
Contributors selected for publication will work with editors accustomed to shaping firsthand accounts into narratives that stand on the strength of their evidence and the clarity of their witness. The aim is not embellishment but fidelity: to help each writer bring forward what was seen, what was endured, and what continues to reverberate. Writers who choose to submit are joining a record of this moment built line by line, from those who lived it.
What You Could Win
One contributor will receive $1,000 in professional editing services. The award may be used across any of the offerings below, each grounded in the practical work of strengthening a manuscript.
Developmental Editing
A close study of the manuscript’s structure. Editors identify where the narrative holds, where it buckles, and what must be repositioned for the work to stand on its own terms.
Manuscript Review
A written assessment that accounts for tone, continuity, and the integrity of the record. The report outlines what is working, what is not, and the changes needed to bring the manuscript into clearer focus.
Query Letter and Book Proposal Support
Guidance on shaping the materials that govern first impressions. Editors help clarify the project’s purpose, sharpen its framing, and present its stakes without excess.
Line Editing
Sentence-level refinement that removes drift and imprecision. The goal is a page where each line carries its full weight without drawing attention to the edit behind it.
Strategy Sessions
Conversations with an editor about the next phase of the work. These sessions address timing, revision priorities, and the decisions that determine a manuscript's progression.
Who’s Eligible
Eligibility is open to anyone submitting nonfiction, poetry, or visual work for the #ForThePeople series during the June 2025 through June 2026 window. Submissions may draw on the writer’s own experience or on events carried by a family, a neighborhood, or a community whose history has not been formally recorded. Witness takes many forms, and this series recognizes the value of accounts preserved through direct observation, inherited memory, or the fragments of documentation left behind.
We are seeking work grounded in moments when private life collides with public authority. This may involve encounters with immigration enforcement, displacement carried out through administrative channels, the suppression of protest, failures within institutions meant to protect, or conditions in which essential services collapse while responsibility is deflected elsewhere. We also welcome work from regions where these pressures accumulate quietly, where records are sparse, and where the burden of proof falls on those least equipped to supply it.
All entries must be accurate in their account, whether recounting one’s own experience or preserving the experience of another. Previously published material may only be submitted with full disclosure. The expectation is straightforward: the work should offer a faithful record of what occurred, set down with the care required when a narrative becomes part of the public record.
Why This Matters
The purpose of this series is record-keeping. It recognizes that much of what shapes public life in the United States never enters an official file. When systems fail, the first casualties are often the facts themselves. Testimony becomes scattered across text messages, affidavits no one reads, hospital intake forms, or conversations that carry the weight of evidence without the protection of a formal record.
Over the past several years, the country has seen a rise in conditions that are rarely subject to administrative review. Federal reports show that immigration cases involving expedited removal have increased, leaving families with minutes to hours to respond before separation becomes permanent. Housing data collected through the Census Bureau’s Pulse Survey indicates that millions of households have fallen behind on rent at least once in the past year, with eviction filings climbing in several major cities to levels surpassing pre-pandemic baselines. The National Labor Relations Board continues to document a steady escalation in unfair labor practice charges as employers challenge organizing efforts through tactics that delay or suppress collective action. Each of these trends affects individual lives in ways that often leave no durable trace.
Outside the United States, the scale of displacement in Gaza has produced a generation of families whose histories now exist primarily through personal accounts. International agencies can quantify population movements and infrastructure losses, but the texture of what happened—how homes disappeared, how relatives were separated, how neighborhoods were altered beyond recognition—comes from those who lived through it.
The #ForThePeople series exists to preserve these kinds of accounts before they are overwritten by distance, bureaucracy, or official silence. It acknowledges that many people do not control the documents that define their circumstances. What they do control is the narrative they choose to set down.
One contributor will receive $1,000 in professional editing services. The award is not a prize for style; it is support for shaping testimony into a form that can stand, be cited, and be understood without distortion. Whether you write often or have never attempted to put this material on the page, the work will be treated with the seriousness required when personal experience functions as evidence. If what happened has been minimized or dismissed in every other venue, this is a place where the record begins on your terms.
How to Enter
Submit your work directly to the #ForThePeople series.
Include your full contact details, a short biographical statement, and a cover letter with your entry.
All submissions received between June 1 and June 30, 2026, will be automatically entered into the contest for the one-thousand-dollar professional editing prize. Selected entries will also be published in For The Writers’ digital and print magazine.
The winner will be announced in September 2026 through email notification and on For The Writers’ official social media channels.
Need to Remain Anonymous?
Speaking out can be dangerous. Around the world, people face surveillance, censorship, and punishment for telling the truth. In the United States, immigrants risk detention or deportation if they speak publicly about ICE abuses. In Gaza, journalists and civilians documenting bombings face targeted attacks and communications blackouts. In Russia, citizens can be fined or jailed for voicing dissent against the war in Ukraine. These are not abstract fears. They are the reality for people trying to make their stories heard right now.
We recognize that sharing experiences of trauma, injustice, or government abuse carries real risk. If revealing your identity could endanger your safety, legal standing, or family, you can submit your story anonymously. Our Anonymity and Consent Policy outlines how we safeguard your information, remove identifying details when necessary, and ensure you maintain full control of your narrative throughout the editorial process.
If you have concerns about how your story will be handled, please contact us directly. We will work with you to ensure your safety while ensuring your voice is heard. Every story deserves to be recorded, even if the name attached to it cannot. Your words can still carry weight, spark change, and receive the professional support needed to reach readers safely.
Continue reading: Review the For The Writers Anonymity and Consent Policy
Comments