Nimrod Literary Awards
Nimrod International Journal
Entry Fee:
$20
Deadline:
April 1, 2024
Two prizes of $2,000 each and publication in Nimrod International Journal are given annually for a poem or a group of poems and a work of fiction.
Genre: Poetry
Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize
Ashland Poetry Press
Entry Fee:
$27
Deadline:
May 1, 2024
A prize of $1,000, publication by Ashland Poetry Press, and 25 author copies is given annually for a poetry collection. Matthew Rohrer will judge. Using only the online submission system, submit a manuscript of 48 to 96 pages with a $27 entry fee by May 1. Visit the website for complete guidelines.
Antivenom Poetry Award
Elixir Press
Entry Fee:
$30
Deadline:
March 31, 2024
A prize of $1,000 and publication by Elixir Press is given annually for a first or second poetry collection. Kathleen Winter will judge. Submit a manuscript of at least 48 pages with a $30 entry fee by March 31. All entries are considered for publication. Visit the website for complete guidelines.
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Cosmic Connection
“You have changed me already. I am a fireball / That is hurtling towards the sky to where you are,” begins Dorothea Lasky’s “Poem to an Unnameable Man” from her 2010 collection, Black Life. The poem’s speaker regales their addressee with the projected story of their intense connection, as Lasky incorporates cosmic imagery, a confessional tone, and grandiose language combined with an intimate, idiosyncratic voice. This week write a poem that traverses the galaxy and addresses someone or something you feel tethered to, as if you’re “hurtling towards” them. As you write, play around with figurative language that points to both sizable and smaller, nuanced observations.
Ten Questions for Omotara James
“Your instinct to wait to publish is right. You only get one debut.” —Omotara James, author of Song of My Softening
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What Herbie Hancock Taught Me About Formal Poetry
The author of Midwhistle contemplates the common ground between jazz music and poetry.
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An All-Purpose Product by Patricia Smith
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In this Button Poetry video, Patricia Smith reads her poem “An All-Purpose Product,” which appears in her award-winning collection Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012), for the 2016 Get Lit Classic Slam in Los Angeles.
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Deadline Approaches for the CAAPP/Autumn House Press Book Prize
Poets of African descent sitting on a first or second collection (including work that intersects with poetry, such as hybrid text, speculative prose, and translation) should not miss out on the chance to submit to the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics/Autumn House Press Book Prize. This year’s deadline is February 15. The annual prize awards $3,000 and publication to a writer “embodying African American, African, or African diasporic experiences.”
Using only the online submission system, submit 48 to 168 pages of poetry or poetry-adjacent work. There is no entry fee. Visit the website for complete guidelines.
Founded in 1998, Autumn House Press publishes books in all genres with the belief “that literature is an affirmation of the deep and elemental range of our human experience” and that “our need for it is crucial now more than ever.” Over the years, the press has met this commitment by putting out debut poetry collections such as Ada Limón’s Lucky Wreck (2006), Danusha Laméris’s The Moons of August (2014), Cameron Barnett’s The Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water (2017), and Eric Tran’s The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer (2020). This year’s CAAPP Book Prize judge, Aracelis Girmay, is a hybrid genre poet whose most recent work is the chapbook and was a flower (Center for Book Arts, 2023), made in collaboration with book artist Valentina Améstica.
Gregory Pardlo in Conversation With Imani Perry
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“To make ancestors whole is to imagine, collectively, publicly, who they were and what their experiences were like.” In this New York Public Library event, former Cullman Center fellow and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Gregory Pardlo discusses the themes within his latest poetry collection, Spectral Evidence (Knopf, 2024), and talks about interrogating the present-day erasure of Black history in a conversation with Imani Perry.
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In Equal Measure
“In writing the sonnets of frank, the form was a rescue raft, a lifeline, the safety net beneath the trapeze act. I liked how it equalized every event, relationship, song, or story that the individual sonnet might take on,” says poet Diane Seuss in a 2022 Publishers Weekly interview with Maya C. Popa about her Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, in which she explores with brutal frankness her personal history and themes of death, illness, addiction, and love. Inspired by Seuss, write two fourteen-line sonnets with vastly different subjects. In using a specific form to create a sort of equalizing force between topics, how do the minor victories and upsets of mundane occurrences find balance with the heavier ups and downs of your life?
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