Best Microfiction 2026

Meg Pokrass, Gary Fincke, and Diane Seuss, editors

1st Runner-Up of the Short Story / Anthology category in the 2025 Eric Hoffer Awards

WINNER of the Bronze Medal for a book series in the 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards

The Best Microfiction anthology series provides recognition for outstanding literary stories of 400 words or fewer. Co-edited by award-winning microfiction writer/editor Meg Pokrass, and Flannery O’Connor Prize-winning author Gary Fincke, the anthology features Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Diane Seuss serving as final judge, and the world's best very short short stories.

Other books in the series: Best Microfiction

“I know of no better representation of all that’s happening right now with the micro story than the Best Microfiction anthology. What a coming together of voices, energies, experiments, visions. This is not a collection to work through, as a reader. This is a collection to savor.” Scott Garson, Wigleaf

“When you read a piece under 400 words that stops you in your tracks, it only makes you want to read another with such power. Fortunately, thankfully, we have Best Microfiction, which gives us a book of the best. They may be short, but the pieces will last you a year, making their way into your heart and mind—just in time for next year’s edition.” Brian Mihok, matchbook

Meg Pokrass, series editor, is the author of 7 flash fiction collections, an award-winning collection of prose poetry, 2 flash-novellas and 2 new co-written collections of flash, The House of Grana Padano, co-written with Jeff Friedman (Pelekinesis, 2022) and Disappearing Debutantes, co-written with Aimee Parkison (Outpost 19, 2023). Her work has appeared in hundreds of literary magazines and international anthologies including Electric Literature, Wigleaf, Washington Square Review, American Journal of Poetry, McSweeney's has appeared in 2 Norton anthologies of the flash fiction form: New Micro (W.W. Norton & Co., 2018), Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton & Co., 2015). Meg is the Founding Editor of New Flash Fiction Review, Flash Challenge Columnist for Mslexia Magazine, and teaches private microfiction workshops.
Gary Fincke, editor, has published thirty-one books of poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction, most recently, Bringing Back the Bones: New and Selected Poems, A Room of Rain: Stories, and The Killer’s Dog: Stories.
Diane Seuss’s sixth collection is Modern Poetry (Graywolf Press 2024), a finalist for the National Book Award, and on the shortlist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press 2021) was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Pen Voelcker Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. Four-Legged Girl was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She received a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2021 John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Seuss is a chancellor for the Academy of American Poets. Her seventh collection, Althea: poems, is forthcoming in 2027. She was raised in rural Michigan, and has lived for many years in Kalamazoo, where she was Writer in Residence at Kalamazoo College.