Poetry Contest 2025
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Guidelines & Information:
Poems must be your original and unpublished creative work, and must not have won a major prize in other contests. Please put all poems in one file, and please number the pages. Do not include identifying information on the poems or file name.
Details:
- Deadline: May 1st. Winners are announced in late summer and are published in the Fall/Winter Issue.
- One Grand Prize winner will receive $1000 and publication. Twenty entrants will receive International Publication Awards, with publication in the contest issue, and a free copy. Thirty entrants will receive International Merit Awards, with recognition in the contest issue, and a free copy.
- Previous Grand Prize winners and associates, friends, or students of the judge(s) are not eligible.
- We offer a flat rate: $16 for 5 poems (total of 10 pages per submission), all in a single file, each poem beginning on a new page. Please do not include more than 5 poems in an individual submission. However, you may make as many submissions as you like, provided you submit the $16 fee each time. (That is to say, please make multiple entries in Submittable to enter more than 5 poems. So, if you wanted to submit 15 poems, you would enter the contest 3 times, and pay the $16 for each submission.)
- We do not accept contest entries by snail mail. Any entries received by mail will be returned unread.
- Please do not submit contest poems to our general submission pool.
Please Note: We will try to accommodate poems with special formatting needs (specific margins, long lines, etc.), but we can't guarantee that your poem will appear on our pages exactly as you submitted them. We encourage poets to follow standard formatting guidelines: Times New Roman 12, with 1" margins. This will help minimize appearance shifts as we import your poems into our publishing software.
Kindly do not send any work that harms or marginalizes others, or is sexist, misogynistic, racist, ageist, classist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic, fatphobic etc. We also don’t want poems that glorify violence or focus on dead-or-dying animals.