While the literary community has weathered significant disruptions over the past few decades — from the COVID-19 pandemic to the rise of artificial intelligence — a Northampton-based resource website has steadily guided authors through these challenges to nurture their craft.
Now celebrating its 25th anniversary, the Winning Writers platform has grown into a comprehensive ecosystem for creators. The site sponsors four writing contests alongside an extensive database of 200 free-to-enter competitions, each complete with submission guidelines. Beyond contests, Winning Writers offers professional manuscript reviews, educational videos and critical resources to help authors spot publishing scams.
Married co-founders Adam Cohen and Jendi Reiter incorporated the website in September 2001, just before the 9/11 terrorist attacks upended life in their home base of New York City. At the time, Cohen worked as the circulation director for The Atlantic, a role involving “lots of consumer direct marketing fulfillment, customer service [and] data analytics,” he recalled. Meanwhile, Reiter, a published novelist and poet, brought firsthand experience to the venture, having won numerous literary competitions.
“We wanted to do something more entrepreneurial, less of a traditional office job, and thought that we could share the knowledge Jendi had about literary contests with the wider public and hopefully make a little money doing so,” Cohen said.
When Winning Writers was launched, they initially offered just two competitions. The first was a humor poetry contest that encouraged “the best worst poem” — a parody of vanity contests that would “tell almost everybody who entered that they were semi-finalists, their poem was wonderful, and wouldn’t you like to buy our anthology for $49.99?” Cohen explained. The second was the tonal opposite: a war poetry competition that ran for a decade.
While the lineup evolved over the years — dropping a sports poetry and prose division along the way — Winning Writers now hosts four proprietary competitions: the Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest, the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest, the Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest and the North Street Book Prize. Collectively, these awards distribute more than $51,000 annually, which helped draw 11,022 total submissions in 2025.
Seeking more space, a lower cost of living and a location “safer and less exposed” in the wake of 9/11, Cohen and Reiter relocated to Northampton in 2003. The city’s cultural and political landscape proved a natural fit for the couple, who were already familiar with Massachusetts; Reiter had spent summers in the Berkshires, and Cohen grew up in Cambridge. Cohen had initially discovered Northampton through a late-1990s The Atlantic cover story on Tracy Kidder’s book, “Home Town.”
“Perhaps it was fate,” he said.
In fact, Cohen and Reiter named the North Street Book Prize after North Street in Northampton. It’s now their biggest contest, with nine categories.
“We’re very proud of it,” Cohen said. “We’ve received almost 2,000 books now for the past two years, per year, and we spend about half the year judging those.”
Their former Northampton neighbor Annie Mydla remains central to that effort. Though she now lives in Poland, she handles “more work for us than ever,” Cohen noted. From abroad, Mydla directs a freelance team dedicated to writing free, personalized critiques for every single submission to the prize.
“It’s an interesting job for [the freelancers], and we’re able to provide the service to the world at a reasonable price, so I think it’s working really well. We’ve gotten a lot of positive response[s] to the feedback for its quality and personalization, so that’s become a big deal to us,” Cohen said.
Winning Writers has 64,000 email subscribers and more than 65,000 Facebook followers. That growth, Cohen said, is the result of providing free information with lots of details: the contest profiles in their database, for example, “tend to be more detailed than most.”
“It’s not just a bare listing of how to enter it and what the deadline is, but also who we think this is appropriate for, whether a beginning writer or someone who’s more experienced, are there special constraints, geographic restrictions, who’s won it recently, how can I read their work? We go and try and dig into it so people can really make an informed, intelligent decision” about which contests to enter, he said.
Besides that, “Over a long period of time, I think it cultivates trust in the writing community that people aren’t just going to send their entry into a black hole and they have no idea whether it actually got read, or if there’s a problem with it, would we let them know?” he said. “And we really want to treat people like, if this was our entry and was going out into the world, that people [would] take care of it and look out for the interest of the author. … I think we work really hard on that.”
For more information about Winning Writers, visit winningwriters.com. Area residents can catch Reiter live during a free reading at Broadside Bookshop in Northampton on Tuesday, June 9, from 7 to 8 p.m.
