Our 15th Annual Summer Reading Contest

The illustrations for this post were originally created by Adolfo Redaño for “Summer Books 2023.”

Update, June 28: Week 4 of this contest has begun! Click here to find over 50 free Times pieces to read, and to submit your responses.

Our Summer Reading Contest is our longest-running challenge — and our simplest.

All you have to do to participate is tell us what you’re reading, watching or listening to in The New York Times and why.

Don’t have a subscription? No problem! We’ll be providing dozens of free links to teen-friendly articles, essays, videos, podcasts and graphics every week from June through August.

And this summer, both to celebrate the contest’s 15th year and to shake things up a bit, we’ll be trying something new: Students can enter as they always have by submitting a short written response — or they can make a video up to 90 seconds long.

Got questions? We have answers. Everything you need is detailed below.

But if you’re a teacher who would like to have your students practice for this now, before the contest begins, note that the only rule around content is that a piece must have been published in 2024. Beyond that, we don’t care if your students pick something on cats, chatbots, the cost of college or the crisis in the Middle East; Beyoncé, book bans, basketball or banana bread. We just want to hear what they think. To help, we’ve created a special practice forum. Join us!