The original tablet literary magazine

The Digital Americana Prize for Storytelling
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The Digital Americana Prize for Storytelling is a digital book award that was established to promote digital publishing innovation and to bring awareness to the craft of multiplatform storytelling.
Submissions are judged based on their overall digital reading experience, their use of interactivity, technology, and literary excellence. Winners receive a handsomely engraved crystal statue.
Submissions are judged based on their overall digital reading experience, their use of interactivity, technology, and literary excellence. Winners receive a handsomely engraved crystal statue.

Winner 2013: The Silent History
Created by: Eli Horowitz, Kevin Moffett, Matthew Derby, and Russell Quinn
Genre: speculative fiction
About: The Silent History is a groundbreaking novel, written and designed specially for iPad and iPhone, that uses serialization, exploration, and collaboration to tell the story of a generation of unusual children. Aside from receiving critical praise since its release in 2013, The Silent History has gone on to demonstrate the viability of creating bespoke storytelling experiences that go beyond the written word.
Genre: speculative fiction
About: The Silent History is a groundbreaking novel, written and designed specially for iPad and iPhone, that uses serialization, exploration, and collaboration to tell the story of a generation of unusual children. Aside from receiving critical praise since its release in 2013, The Silent History has gone on to demonstrate the viability of creating bespoke storytelling experiences that go beyond the written word.


501 Word Writing Contest
Seeking creative flash fiction - Now Open
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About: The 501 Word Writing Contest is meant to be a fun challenge for creative writers with a bit of an awesome reward at the end (and restricting word count is also a great writing practice to exercise anyway).
The top five finalists will be published in an upcoming issue of Digital Americana.
The winning story receives publication as well as the production of a short literary film (inspired by their own winning 501 word story) by the Digital Americana creative team. See the previous contest winner’s video for example.
The guest judge this year is director and author, Adam Cushman of Red14Films (which is a leading film production company that specializes in book trailers and other literary to film adaptations).
Submission Guidelines: All entries must be unpublished, original creative flash fiction that is up to 501 words in length. There are no other restrictions, including genre. Submissions must be received by December 31, 2013.
The top five finalists will be published in an upcoming issue of Digital Americana.
The winning story receives publication as well as the production of a short literary film (inspired by their own winning 501 word story) by the Digital Americana creative team. See the previous contest winner’s video for example.
The guest judge this year is director and author, Adam Cushman of Red14Films (which is a leading film production company that specializes in book trailers and other literary to film adaptations).
Submission Guidelines: All entries must be unpublished, original creative flash fiction that is up to 501 words in length. There are no other restrictions, including genre. Submissions must be received by December 31, 2013.
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2013-2014 Winner:
Tom Howard
Watch now: Second Memory of Pterodactyl
Finalists:
(published in the Winter 2014 issue)
J. Howard Shannon
Suzanne Stauss
Rebecca Meacham
Tara Deal.
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It Was Time To Escape Again
by Rip Brown (2012 Winner)
It was time to escape again. Wait. Start over. At the beginning—no—slightly forward. To that Southwest corner of Connecticut before he was a corrupted boy, where country clubs and white church steeples dominated the landscape, swimming pools behind patrician gates and stone terraces and green lawns with fountains and statues and garden parties with dark skinned help from Bridgeport and Norwalk. This was the angst into which he had been born (where he must return if he were to move on): always on the run from this place—children from whining broods fighting for parents’ attention, who, more concerned with tennis whites on mauve clay, swung their racquets with vengeance but in style, splashing rye and gin at court side with coddled lips and blood shot eyes. Junior Leaguers who showed off their razzmatazz, posing for photographs to appear on society pages of local rags wearing their cocktailed dresses with hemlines a dollar bill above the knee, naked pumps and beads and Jacquelyn Kennedy hairdos and pastel colored espadrilles married to Yale Republicans—the William Buckley kind—there was no such thing as New Republicans nor the Religious Right—just working class Democrats with jobs in the trades, electricians and plumbers, those who installed garage doors, cleaned swimming pools, tuned foreign autos, laid bored housewives—whose husbands took their fantasies on the Pennsylvania Central to Grand Central on weekdays to work on Madison or Park or Wall Street then afterwards conspire to hang out in their favorite bars like cattlemen to stare, with white devil eyes, at flirtatious temptations, mistresses to-be, arrogant and self righteous in their knowledge they deserved it, slaving away as they did, in that sweat filled city of un-tucked button-downs and dangling dark ties wrinkled gray flannel suits all so that their better halves could spend summer days fawning over bronzed club pros from places like San Juan or Johannesburg giving them group lessons or private whatever they preferred while their little beasts commingled as competing tribes of savages like sharks after fishes at poolside under the unwatchful eyes of lifeguards themselves spoiled sons and daughters of wealth who only half-disciplined their charges as if that too were a game, who wore long hair and protested war when both still meant something—a time when the generations were alienated from each other for a reason. Never trust anyone over thirty. James was thirteen then, what did he know about anything?
“It Was Time to Escape Again,” by Rip Brown was the winning 501-word entry selected from the first Digital Americana 501-Word writing contest and the inspiration for the video below. The video was originally featured in the Spring/Summer 2012 issue of Digital Americana.
List of all 2011-2012 finalists: Rip Brown (winner), Steve Morgan, Lynlea Oppie, Raj Kapoor, Nanette Avery, James White, Clarence Bastedo, Gene Fida, Josh Patrick, and Thomas S. Bender.
“It Was Time to Escape Again,” by Rip Brown was the winning 501-word entry selected from the first Digital Americana 501-Word writing contest and the inspiration for the video below. The video was originally featured in the Spring/Summer 2012 issue of Digital Americana.
List of all 2011-2012 finalists: Rip Brown (winner), Steve Morgan, Lynlea Oppie, Raj Kapoor, Nanette Avery, James White, Clarence Bastedo, Gene Fida, Josh Patrick, and Thomas S. Bender.
Digital Americana