About This Call
Ponder Review, in partnership with the Tennessee Williams Tribute Festival, is launching our annual 10:4 Tenn Playwright Contest! This competition seeks to recognize and honor the Southern experience and the legacy of Columbus's native son, Tennessee Williams through the craft of playwriting.
The top three playwrights will receive a cash prize, a festival pass, and have their 10-minute plays produced and performed in front of a live audience at the Tennessee Williams Tribute Festival. Directors and actors will be students from the Mississippi University for Women theatre department.
Each play will be read by the staff of Ponder Review for the first round, then after carefully making their selections, the finalists will be sent off to the final judge who will decide the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners.
The guest judge this year is Kira Obolensky, an award-winning writer who lives in Minneapolis. Her plays have been produced Off Broadway, in Los Angeles, in Prague and Terezin, and in many non-traditional theater spaces. She has received the Kesselring Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Mellon Playwright Fellowship, which put her in residence with Ten Thousand Things for six years. Most recently, she worked with Mixed Blood Theater and Riverplace in Warroad to create a community play called Warroad Community Potluck, that was performed by the community and directed by Michael John Garcés. Her newest play, Willa Cather Is Dying, was part of Illusion Theater's 2026 Fresh Ink series. She co-wrote a national bestseller about architecture, The Not So Big House, and has published two other books about architecture. Her short fiction has appeared in The Brooklyn Review, in hive literary, in Rollick, and in Quarterly West, where her novella, The Anarchists Float to St. Louis, won the novella prize. She attended Juilliard's Playwriting Program, Williams College, and received an MFA in Fiction Writing from Warren Wilson. She teaches at Spalding University's Naslund Mann Graduate School of Writing. Kira is a proud member of the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis and The Tent in NYC.
Winners of the seventh annual 10:4 Tenn Playwright Contest will be announced Spring 2027.
1st place winner will be awarded a $200 cash prize as well as publication in the Fall Ponder Review issue. 2nd place will be awarded a $150 cash prize, and 3rd place will be awarded a $100 cash prize.
10:4 TENN 10-Minute Play Contest Submission Guidelines
- Plays must be at maximum 10 minutes long and inspired by the work of Tennessee Williams
- Maximum cast of 5 characters
- Play must include character and set descriptions
- Submissions should be Times New Roman 12pt font, double-spaced, in standard playwriting format
- Limit 1 play per playwright
- Along with submission, include a bio and brief synopsis of the play