Sine Theta Magazine

Sine Theta’s 8th annual writing contest

Sine Theta is pleased to host the seventh iteration of our annual writing contest! We are delighted to announce Jeremy Tiang (author of State of Emergency) as this year’s fiction judge and John Yau (author of Diary of Small Discontents) as this year’s poetry judge.

Submit by Sunday 30 August 2026 for a chance to be published in our upcoming issue, sinθ #38 “TINY 小”. This year, we’re able to offer the winner in each category a $150 USD cash prize. Thank you to our Patreon subscribers for the support that makes this content possible.

We’re accepting entries for both fiction (prose) and poetry. We invite you to reflect on the following three prompts as inspiration for your pieces. You may reflect on the prompts separately or as a collective, drawing themes and ideas that resonate with you. Entries must engage with the prompt(s), and can do so either directly or indirectly.

There is no submission fee. Entries will close at 11:59PM PDT.

You may only submit one entry per category, so send us your best work!

Prompts

“Human existence involves the willful destruction of the existential memories of other creatures and of your own memories as well. No life can survive without other lives, without the ecological memories other living creatures have, memories of the environments in which they live. People don’t realize they need to rely on the memories of other organisms to survive.” — Wu Ming-Yi, tr. Darryl Sterk, The Man with the Compound Eyes
“I was supposed to want to go over to my friend’s house and I was supposed to want to paint my nails and play tag and jump rope and do the things that kids my age did, but the truth was I only ever wanted to be sandwiched between my parents, I only ever wanted them to need me and I only ever thought about them and all the ways in which I could please them, or better yet, impress them with how much I wanted to remain their daughter and how much I wanted them to remain my parents.” — Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart
Still from Millennium Mambo (dir. Hou Hsiao Hsien, 2002):

Image description: An interior space lit by daylight coming in from a window in the background. A beaded curtain with heart-shaped beads separates two rooms and the camera is positioned behind the curtain. The frame is close-cropped,depicting a woman in a brown top and a hair net who stands behind the curtain and looks past it towards something off-camera. The overall atmosphere is one of stillness.

In addition to these three prompts, submittors may wish to consider the following list of key themes and phrases:

dollhouses - miniatures - figurines - models / bigs-and-littles - sororities - fraternities / scarcity - shortages - engineered scarcity / “on exactitude in science,” jorge luis borges - prototypes - samples - visual metaphors / cute - adorable - kawaii / youth - innocence - children - fertility - embryo / thinness - beauty standards / insects - larvae - parasites - viruses / minimalism - cleanness - marie kondo - tiny homes / hong kong cage homes - kowloon walled city - urban density - unfair housing policies and real estate development conflicts - public housing architecture / magnifying glass - microscopes / atoms - electrons - protons - quarks - radiation - fission / wear and tear - used, like new / defects - errors - mistakes - statistics / social class - caste - confucian hierarchy - chinese imperial court dynamics - demotion / dust - sediment - particles / tops and bottoms - yaoi hands - power-dynamic influences within kink communities /

HOW TO ENTER

Email sinethetamag@gmail.com with “Writing Competition - NAME - CATEGORY” as the subject line. Attach your submission as a PDF or Word document, with the document title as “CATEGORY - WORK TITLE”.

Do not include your name on the document, as entries will be judged anonymously. If you are entering a poetry and a fiction piece, please submit each piece separately via email.

Please include the following completed form with your submission in the body of your email:

Name:
Chinese name (if available):
Short third-person bio (less than 80 words):
If poetry - line count:
If fiction - word count:
Content warnings (if applicable):
Do you identify as a member of the Sino diaspora?: Yes/No (If the answer is no, please do not submit.)
Do you confirm that the submitted work is entirely your own, that all quotes have been appropriately attributed, and that no generative AI was used in your process?: Yes/No (If the answer is no, please do not submit.)
Do you confirm that you have read the contest’s terms and guidelines (at the bottom of this page)?: Yes/No (If the answer is no, please do not submit.)

JUDGES

Photo credit: Qingshan Wang

Fiction judge:

Jeremy Tiang's novel State of Emergency won the 2018 Singapore Literature Prize, and his short story collection It Never Rains on National Day was shortlisted for the same prize. Both books were published in Singapore by Epigram Books and internationally by World Editions. His bilingual play Salesman之死 won an Obie Award, and his radio drama The Postal Vote will be broadcast later this year on BBC Radio 4. He is the translator of over thirty books from Chinese, including novels by Yan Ge, Huang Chong-Kai, Zhang Yueran, Shuang Xuetao and Yeng Pway Ngon, and the Booker-longlisted Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi. Originally from Singapore, he now lives in New York City.

Photo credit: Chris Felver

Poetry judge:

John Yau began reviewing for Art in America in 1978. He went on write for Artforum, Arts, and Frieze, as well as write catalog essays and contribute to museum publications. His many monographs include Eric Aho (2026), John Pai: Liquid Steel (2023), Joe Brainard: The Art of the Personal (2022), Liu Xiaodong (2021), and A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns (2008). His most recent book of essays, Please Wait by the Coatroom: Reconsidering Race and Identity in American Art (2024), received an American Book Award (2025). In 2012, he stopped writing for The Brooklyn Rail and began writing reviews for Hyperallergic. His curatorial projects include the widely acclaimed, The Unseen Professors: Leo Amino (1911-1989), Minoru Niizuma (1930-1998), John Pai (b. 1937) for Tina Kim Gallery (2021. His awards for criticism, poetry, and contributions to culture include John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry (2006) Chevalier in Order of Arts and Letters (France) (2010), Jackson Prize in Poetry (2017), and Rabkin Prize in Art Criticism 2021. The author of more than 20 books of poetry, his most recent is Diary of Small Discontents: New & Selected Poems 1974-2024 (2025). He lives in Beacon, New York.

TERMS AND GUIDELINES

The competition is open to all members of the Sino diaspora, regardless of age or nationality.
Submissions are free of charge.
All entries must be received by 11:59PM Pacific time on Sunday 30 August 2026.
An entrant may submit only one piece per category (poetry and fiction) for consideration. Pieces may not be altered once submitted.
The competition organizers reserve the right to change the judging panel without notice.
Our editorial board will review all pieces and forward shortlisted pieces to judges, who will determine the winners. Judges’ decisions are final. There will be no additional correspondence between the editorial board and judges about the works during the adjudication process.
All winners are guaranteed publication in sinθ #38.
All shortlistees are guaranteed publication in sinθ.
All contest entries will also be considered for regular publication in sinθ.
All authors published in sinθ receive a $10 USD honorarium. For the two contest winners, there is an additional $140 USD prize, amounting to a total of $150 USD.
All entries are judged anonymously — do not include your name on your works.
All entries must include the filled-out submission form. Entries that do not include this form will be disqualified.
Every piece must have a title.
Pieces must engage with the prompt(s) provided, either directly or indirectly.
Word counts: fiction submissions can be no longer than 3000 words (excluding title), and poetry submissions can be no longer than 35 lines (excluding title).
Entries must be submitters’ original work. Plagiarized work will be disqualified from the competition. If this is discovered after acceptance or after publication, the editors will remove the work from the issue and our archives.
Generative AI may not be used in any part of the writing process. Work created with generative AI will be disqualified from the competition. If this is discovered after acceptance or after publication, the editors will remove the work from the issue and our archives.
Prose pieces must be works of fiction.
We do not accept simultaneous submissions for the contest. Entries also may not have been previously published, whether online or in print (including self-publishing on a blog).
Entries can include Chinese or other languages so long as they are written primarily in English.
Winners will be notified after the judging period has concluded.
We look forward to receiving your entries!