Genre: Poetry

Upcoming Contest Deadlines

G&A: The Contest Blog
12.16.22

Celebrate the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023 in literary style by submitting to contests with deadlines of December 31 and January 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6! Don’t miss the opportunity to receive fellowships offering $43,750 for a nine-month residency at Colgate University, $72,000 and writing space at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City, and $15,000 alongside a yearlong stay in the Bay Area. All contests offer a cash prize of $1,000 or more and four are free to enter. Continue flourishing into the new year, writers! 

Boulevard
Short Fiction Contest for Emerging Writers
A prize of $1,500 and publication in Boulevard is given annually for a short story by a writer who has not published a nationally distributed book. The editors will judge. All entries are considered for publication. Deadline: December 31. Entry fee: $16, which includes a subscription to Boulevard.

Colgate University
Olive B. O’Connor Fellowships
Two nine-month residencies at Colgate University, including a stipend of $43,750, health benefits, and travel expenses, are given annually to poets, fiction writers, or nonfiction writers. The 2023–2024 fellowships will be awarded to a poet and a nonfiction writer working on their first books. Each fellow will teach one creative writing course per semester and give a public reading. Writers who have recently completed an MFA, MA, or PhD in creative writing are among those eligible. Deadline: January 6. Entry fee: none.

Florida Review
Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Contest
A prize of $1,000 and publication by Florida Review is given annually for a chapbook of short fiction, short nonfiction, or graphic narrative. All entries are considered for publication. Deadline: December 31. Entry fee: $25, which includes a subscription to Florida Review.

Leon Levy Center for Biography
Leon Levy Biography Fellowships
Four fellowships of $72,000, writing space at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City, access to research facilities, and research assistance from a graduate student are given annually to nonfiction writers working on biographies. An additional fellowship, the Sloan Fellowship, is given annually to a writer working on a biography of a figure in the field of science or technology. Deadline: January 4. Entry fee: none.

Mississippi Review
Mississippi Review Prize
Three prizes of $1,000 each and publication in Mississippi Review are given annually for a single poem, a short story, and an essay. Current or former University of Southern Mississippi students are ineligible. All entries are considered for publication. Deadline: January 1. Entry fee: $15 ($16 for electronic submissions), which includes a copy of the prize issue.

The Moth
Poetry Prize
A prize of €6,000 (approximately $6,128) and publication in the Moth is given annually for a single poem. Three runner-up prizes of €1,000 (approximately $1,021) each and publication in the Moth are also given. The four shortlisted poets, including the winner, will also be invited to read at an awards ceremony at the Poetry Ireland festival in Dublin in spring 2023. Louise Glück will judge. Deadline: December 31. Entry fee: €15 (approximately $15) per poem.

North Carolina Writers’ Network
Jacobs/Jones African American Literary Prize
A prize of $1,000 is given annually for a short story or an essay that “seeks to convey the rich and varied existence of Black North Carolinians.” The winning entry is considered for publication in the Carolina Quarterly. Black writers who live in North Carolina are eligible. Deadline: January 2. Entry fee: $20 ($10 for NCWN members).

Poetry Society of America
Four Quartets Prize
A prize of $20,000 is given annually for a unified and complete sequence of poems published in the United States in a print or online journal, a chapbook, or a book during the current year. Three finalists, including the winner, will receive $1,000 each. Deadline: December 31. Entry fee: none.

San José State University
Steinbeck Fellowships in Creative Writing  
Six yearlong residencies at San José State University in San José, California, which include a stipend of $15,000 each, are given annually to fiction writers and creative nonfiction writers. The fellows are required to give one public reading and may be asked to live in the Bay Area during the academic year, as public health guidelines allow. Deadline: January 3. Entry fee: none.

Tupelo Press
Dorset Prize
A prize of $9,000, publication by Tupelo Press, and 20 author copies is given annually for a poetry collection. The winner also receives the option of either a weeklong residency at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Massachusetts, or a two-week residency at Gentle House in Port Angeles, Washington, both valued at $1,000. Diane Seuss will judge. All entries are considered for publication. Deadline: December 31. Entry fee: $30. 

Visit the contest websites for complete guidelines, and check out the Grants & Awards database and Submission Calendar for more contests in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and translation.

Lunch Poems With Alex Dimitrov

Caption: 

“I don’t want to sound unreasonable / but I need to be in love immediately.” In this video, Alex Dimitrov reads a selection of poems from his collection Love and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021) for UC Berkeley’s Lunch Poems reading series. “Twelve Films That Put Me in the Mood to Write” by Dimitrov appears in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Genre: 
Poetry
Tags: 
Alex Dimitrov
Love and Other Poems
Copper Canyon Press
2021
Lunch Poems
2022
January/February 2023

5 Over 50: 2022 Virtual Reading

Caption: 

In this virtual reading, Poets & Writers editor in chief Kevin Larimer introduces the 2022 cohort of “5 Over 50” debut authors, Sari Botton, author of And You May Find Yourself: Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo (Heliotrope Books, 2022); Shareen K. Murayama, author of Housebreak (Bad Betty Press, 2022); Madhushree Ghosh, author of Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey of Food, Memory, and Family (University of Iowa Press, 2022); David Santos Donaldson, author of Greenland (Amistad, 2022); and Jane Campbell, author of Cat Brushing (Grove Atlantic, 2022).

Genre: 
Poetry
Fiction
Creative Nonfiction
Tags: 
Kevin Larimer
5 Over 50
Sari Botton
Shareen K. Murayama
Madhushree Ghosh
David Santos Donaldson
Jane Campbell
2022
debut author
Poets & Writers Live

Wrongness

The Time Is Now
12.13.22

“I first started writing poetry (and still write it) because the world, its people, and their ideas are wrong, insane, immoral, flawed, or unimaginably terrible. I write because I feel wrong, sad, crazy, disappointed, disappointing, and unimaginably terrible,” writes Rachel Zucker in “The Poetics of Wrongness, an Unapologia,” the first in a series of lectures delivered for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series in 2016 and collected in The Poetics of Wrongness, forthcoming in February from Wave Books. In the form of an unapologia, a reversal of the traditional apologia form that typically consists of a defense of one’s own opinions and actions, Zucker posits that “wrongness” is intrinsic to writing poetry and that poetry asserts “with its most defining formal device—the line break—that the margins of prose are wrong, or—with its attention to diction—that the ways in which we’ve come to understand and use words [is] wrong.” Write a poem in the form of an unapologia. Identify when you have been wrong in the past, and try not to defend yourself. Instead, speak through your feelings of wrongness.

Henri Cole Reads at the Hammer Museum

Caption: 

“Staggering out of a black-red peony, / where you have been hiding all morning / from the frigid air, you regard me smearing / jam on dark toast.” Henri Cole reads his poem “Face of the Bee” and other selections from his latest poetry collection, Blizzard (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), in this recent reading at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

Genre: 
Poetry
Tags: 
Henri Cole
Blizzard
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Hammer Museum
2022
reading

Submissions Open for the Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary Awards

G&A: The Contest Blog
12.9.22

The submission deadline for the annual Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA) Literary Awards is coming up! Given for a poetry collection, a first novel, a book of fiction, and a book of nonfiction (including creative nonfiction) by African American writers published in the United States in the current year, these awards honor literary works that depict the “cultural, historical, or sociopolitical aspects of the Black Diaspora.” Winners in the four categories will each receive $1,000. Books published by small, large, and specialty presses are eligible.

Publishers may nominate books published in 2022 by sending one copy of each title to be considered to members of the awards committee by December 31. There is no entry fee. Visit the website for complete guidelines and a list of jurors to whom books should be sent.

Now in its fifty-second year running, BCALA is devoted to advocating for the “development, promotion, and improvement of library services and resources” for the African American community at large and provides professional development for Black librarians. The association’s literary awards, which were first presented in 1994 at the second National Conference of African American Librarians, acknowledge books that “portray some aspect of the African American experience” whether it be from the past, present, or future. Decisions for this year’s awards will be made in January 2023, and the winners will be presented at the American Library Association’s conference in June. Now in its fifty-second year running, BCALA is devoted to advocating for the “development, promotion, and improvement of library services and resources” for the African American community at large and provides professional development for Black librarians. The association’s literary awards, which were first presented in 1994 at the second National Conference of African American Librarians, acknowledge books that “portray some aspect of the African American experience” whether it be from the past, present, or future. Decisions for this year’s awards will be made in January 2023, and the winners will be presented at the American Library Association’s conference in June. 

Find a Writing Contest

The Grants & Awards database includes details about every writing contest we’ve published in Poets & Writers Magazine during the past year. We carefully review the practices and policies of each contest before including it, making the Grants & Awards database the most trusted resource for legitimate writing contests available anywhere.

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