Age is just a number, right? Not for some writers. I told an eighty-seven-year-old writer friend of mine about a contest for poets ages sixty years and older. Her response: “I’ll apply when I’m sixty.” In a literary culture long obsessed with youth, age can feel like a barrier to acceptance. For years prizes have chosen to spotlight writers under a certain age or connected the idea of the debut to youth—think of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, or “twenty under forty” lists and the like. But at long last, a growing list of organizations is trying to change the narrative through contests honoring older writers. These opportunities affirm the value of lived experience and offer significant rewards that come with monetary prizes and, in some cases, publication. The gains can be greater than what’s stated in the contest description. Inspiration, affirmation, an expansive community of readers and writers, an enduring relationship with a press, and more have come to those who have taken a chance.
At Carlow University in Pittsburgh, the noncredit writing program Madwomen in the Attic has supported women writers of all ages with publication and mentorship opportunities since 1979. As part of this work, program director Sarah Shotland administers the Patricia Dobler Poetry Award, which recognizes a poem written by a woman poet over forty. Shotland sees the work of these poets as having only grown richer with time: “Writing, as an art form, gets better as you get older. You’ve lived more life, you have more insight.” The contest, founded in 2007, is open to emerging writers who have not published a full-length book of poetry. (If you have a chapbook or a self-published book, you are still eligible to apply.) Winners receive $1,000 in cash and travel expenses to and from Carlow University to read with the judge for that year’s award, along with publication in the anthology Voices From the Attic. The 2026 prize will open for submissions in late summer.
The selection process entails one or two readers, depending on the number of entries, who determine the final list of ten to fifteen poems. One winner and three honorable mentions are chosen by a new judge each year. Shotland encourages poets to submit multiple poems to the contest. “We’ve had several winners who have submitted multiple poems, and one of them got selected,” says Shotland. She also advises poets to familiarize themselves with the judge’s work. “Almost every year the poem that wins, I can tell the judge who picked it…. Judges have aesthetics. If you’re deciding how to use your entry fee, I would say really think about the judges of different contests.” Poet Andrea England won the Dobler award the second time she entered the contest and advises her fellow writers to be persistent as they submit. “In Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, he speaks to writing being ‘a necessity’ for a true writer’s survival,” says England. “My advice is to simply get back to allowing the necessity to express itself. Keep writing. Keep submitting.”
Older queer writers can find recognition through the J. Michael Samuel Prize offered by Lambda Literary, a nonprofit that celebrates work by LGBTQ+ writers. L D Lewis, program director at Lambda Literary, understands that the affirmation extends beyond the award itself. “Everything we do here is an honor,” she says. “We are honoring people with awards and trophies, yes, but it’s a received honor on our part to be in a position to recognize these writers in their entirety as human beings and as artists.” Created with a donation from Chuck Forester in 2022, the award is open for applications from prose and poetry writers over the age of fifty, with no fee to apply. The cash prize is $5,000. Applications typically open each year in January and call for a one-page personal statement as well as a writing sample, and previous publication is not necessary. The contest’s 2025 winner, Amy Beth Sisson, says the prize has been inspiring for her: “My therapist had encouraged me to be more open about my identity, so I wrote the application as an exercise to see what it would feel like to present my authentic self to the prize committee.”
Connor Nevitt, managing director of the Speculative Literature Foundation (SLF), points out that writers may underestimate their odds as they consider contests. “One misconception about a lot of grants are the chances of winning. I know writing has a lot of rejections, but it’s a numbers game. Every time you submit to a magazine or apply for a grant, it could be your time,” says Nevitt, who encourages writers to submit to SLF’s Older Writers Grant, which aims to “assist such writers who are just beginning their careers as speculative fiction writers.” To be eligible for this prize, writers must be at least fifty and writing speculative fiction; entrants must not have made more than $1,000 from writing for publications. The cash prize is $1,000, and entries are accepted annually during the month of May. Kiran Kaur Saini, the contest’s 2020 winner, says she received a huge boost in confidence from the award: “I was returning to writing after a long, unintentional absence, and it was an embrace I needed from the literary community to help me feel like a legitimate writer again.”
Poets looking to publish a first collection will find an opportunity in the Cardinal Poetry Prize. Sponsored by Wesleyan University Press and named after the university’s mascot, this relatively new prize is open to poets forty and older and offers publication for those who have not had a previous book of poems published (or who published a book more than ten years ago). Suzanna Tamminen, the press’s director and editor in chief, says, “We want to encourage people who are taking their time, either intentionally or unintentionally.” Winners also enjoy a weeklong residency at the Fine Arts Work Center and a cash prize of $1,000. The press received more than four hundred submissions the first year the prize was offered, out of which fifteen finalists were chosen. Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem by the contest’s inaugural winner, Rachel Trousdale, had a print run of 1,200 copies and is almost sold out. The contest is typically open for submissions in the month of February; check the press’s website for details on the 2027 contest.
Another prize for older poets is the Pegasus Poetry Book Prize, a reimagining of the Emily Dickinson First Book Award. Administered by the Poetry Foundation, the contest is open to poets forty and over. Elizabeth O’Connell-Thompson, media manager, explains the contest’s transformation: “It is more than a renaming. A key difference is that the Emily Dickinson First Book Award was open only to debut collections; the Pegasus Poetry Book Prize makes space for second collections.” The winner receives $10,000, and their manuscript is published by Graywolf Press. In addition, the award includes financial support to attend a residency. Check the Poetry Foundation’s website for full details, including the next award deadline; in 2025, submissions opened in November.
Poets over the age of sixty who have published at least one book may also consider the Off the Grid Poetry Prize. A contest from Grid Books that originated in 2011, it receives six hundred to seven hundred submissions each year. Grid Books editor Elizabeth Murphy says she has seen demand for the contest only grow with time. “There are probably many more poets over sixty now than when the contest started, so all the more reason to continue offering it,” says Murphy. “I think it plays an important role in the literary landscape.” She encourages those who don’t win to keep trying and to know that all manuscripts are considered for publication. “We often find manuscripts in those piles that don’t win, but we still want to publish them.”
Sharon Hashimoto, the 2021 winner, had her first and second book published eighteen years apart. “I have always been writing, but retirement allows me time to reflect on my subjects and style and not to try to shove everything into the three months of summer with the occasional sabbatical,” Hashimoto says. “The award also came at a perfect time to shore up my confidence as I transitioned from teaching to writing full-time.”
While this is only a sampling of contests for older writers, it’s apparent that there are fewer contests for those writing prose than there are for poets. But opportunities earmarked for older writers also exist in literary magazines and conference scholarships, a sign that the culture is shifting. Sari Botton, editor in chief of Oldster Magazine, a journal that “explores what it means to travel through time in a human body at every phase of life,” says, “I often feature older authors, many of them debut authors in their fifties, sixties, seventies, and even eighties, because I think that’s really newsworthy.” And it’s important to remember that any contest, barring age restrictions, can be a contest for an older writer: Older writers’ voices are needed everywhere.
So take a risk. The returns may be even greater than you expect. Sarah Shotland of the Patricia Dobler Poetry Award says that a past winner was so heartened by the community she found when she read her work in Pittsburgh that the award winner moved there. In which case, she won not only an award but a new home along with it. May every writing chance you take yield such a homecoming.
Jimin Han is the author of the novels Dreamt I Found You (Little, Brown 2026), The Apology (Little, Brown, 2023), and A Small Revolution (Little A, 2017). She teaches at the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College and community writing centers. Her work has been supported by the New York State Council on the Arts.
Thumbnail credit: Christine Petrella