Can someone explain this? The nomination deadline for the annual Pushcart Prize is December 1. However, if Amazon.com is to be believed, the book with this year’s selections will be available on December 10. That seems like an awfully unlikely turn-around time to me, suggesting that the final table of contents was set long before the nomination deadline. In fact, Amazon is already listing the book as in stock. I don’t see how a nomination that reached Pushcart on December 1 has any shot at making the final cut, quite frankly.
Which is something I wish I’d known when I made my own six nominations last month.
I saw that, too – but I wonder if the ’07 nominations are considered for ’09 publication?
That is a possibility, and I guess it would make sense for stories and poems actually published in December. They don’t make the cut-off at all, whichever way you look at it, and it seems unfair to deem them completely ineligible just because of that.
But it seems like a rather strange way of doing things to me. Why have a submission deadline at all, then — especially one that’s potentionally ambiguous or misleading? The Pushcart website, sparse as it is, does imply that nominations made by December 1 of this year will be considered for this year’s prize and publication. Which seems all but impossible if Amazon already has the book in stock by December 3 or earlier. The contents of the 2008 book were almost certainly finalized months in advance. Any nominations the Pushcart judges receive between then and publication would likely need to be shuffled over to the following year…or dropped from consideration altogether. The former is misleading, and it suggests that a winning story for the fall of 2007 might not see publication until the winter of the following year. The latter, however, is…well, just dishonest.
I much prefer the guidelines for The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, which has a very simple December 31st deadline for nominations. Their final selection is made in January, so there’s much less confusion about what can or can’t make the cut in a given year.
All that said, however, it may just be confusion. I think I need to get in touch with someone at Pushcart directly — unfortunately they don’t list an e-mail address anywhere on their website — and ask. I made six nominations for Kaleidotrope, including three from the April 2007 issue. If I had known that their selections were made before the deadline, I would have sent those three much earlier.
Your nominated story was from the summer, right? So, ostensibly, it should make the cut. But if the editor only submitted it for consideration recently…