Allen County High School Submissions

Closed for Submissions

The high school section of Hog Creek Review is designed to encourage and support creativity by high school students in Allen County, Ohio. The journal is published annually in May. All current high school students in the county are eligible to submit. Hog Creek Review asks for first publication rights and the right to archive the material on our website. All other rights revert to the author following publication.

Submissions of original work are accepted in the following areas: poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and art. Works will be split into two divisions: freshman/sophomore, junior/senior.

Works may be submitted at any point from February 1 to March 4 of each year. Please remember to include your name, the title of your work, and the name of your sponsoring teacher on the first page of each written submission.

• Poetry: up to five poems for each student.
• Fiction: one story, ten pages maximum, double-spaced.
• Creative Nonfiction (true narratives): one story, ten pages maximum, double-spaced.
• Art: up to five works of art, each submitted as a digital photograph.

All submissions must include the name of a sponsoring teacher from your school. This teacher should send an email to hogcreekreview@lima.ohio-state.edu that asserts that, to the best of that teacher's knowledge, the work you are submitting is your own. The email should originate from a high school email address. If a teacher is sponsoring more than one student, a single email that lists the names of the students will suffice.

All works must be entered using our Online Submissions Form.  

If you have any questions about submitting your work, please contact Doug Sutton-Ramspeck at sutton-ramspeck.2@osu.edu or at 419-995-8261.

Not every student whose works we publish will necessarily win an award (for them, payment will be publication) but we will offer cash rewards to many students.

In past years The Lima Breakfast Optimists and the Lima Noon Optimists have generously provided prize money, and we thank them for their support. We will offer twenty Buckeye Creativity Awards each year.

• Ten freshman/sophomores will be awarded $60 gift cards.
• Ten junior/seniors will be awarded $100 gift cards.
• Two students (one freshman/sophomore and one junior/senior) will receive Grand Prize Buckeye Creativity Awards. The freshman/sophomore student will receive an additional $60 gift card; the junior/senior student will receive an additional $100 gift card. The prizes will be announced at the Awards Ceremony.

The details of these awards will be announced each fall in a letter to the high school Language Arts and Art teachers in Allen County.

In addition to the cash awards, The Ohio State University at Lima offers $300 scholarship vouchers to the students selected for the Buckeye Creativity Awards. These vouchers may be used by any student who decides to attend our campus, and they are meant to serve as a reward for academic excellence.

Each spring OSU-Lima will sponsors an Awards Ceremony for the high school students selected for Buckeye Creativity Awards. The ceremony will include food, samples of the winning works, and the distribution of the awards.