Genre: Poetry

Poetry and Creative Nonfiction Prizes

Indiana Review
Entry Fee: 
$20
Deadline: 
March 15, 2024
Two prizes of $1,000 each and publication in Indiana Review are given annually for a single poem and an essay. Submit up to three poems of any length or a work of prose of up to 6,000 words with a $20 entry fee, which includes a subscription to Indiana Review, by March 15. Visit the website for complete guidelines.

Montreal International Poetry Prize

McGill University
Entry Fee: 
$15
Deadline: 
May 1, 2024
A prize of $20,000 Canadian (approximately $14,807) and publication in the Montreal Poetry Prize anthology is given biennially for a poem. A.E. Stallings will judge, and Caroline Bird, Sadiqa de Meijer, Kaie Kellough, Stephen Kuusisto, Danielle Legros Georges, Randy Lundy, rob mclennan, Andrew McMillan, Damen O?Brien, Bianca Stone, Mai Der Vang, and Sarah Wolfson will serve as jurors. English self-translations of works originally written in another language are accepted. Using only the online submission system, submit a poem of up to 40 lines with a $20 Canadian (approximately $15) entry fee by May 1; submissions are also accepted from May 2 to May 15 with a $25 Canadian (approximately $19) entry fee. Visit the website for complete guidelines.

Chapbook Prize

Oversound
Entry Fee: 
$18
Deadline: 
April 30, 2024
A prize of $1,000, publication by Oversound, and 50 author copies is given annually for a poetry chapbook. Diana Khoi Nguyen will judge. Using only the online submission system, submit a manuscript of 15 to 30 pages with an $18 entry fee by April 30. Visit the website for complete guidelines.

Cosmic Connection

2.13.24

“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.

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

Caption: 

“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.

Genre: 

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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