2026 Hurt & Healing Prize

January 5 to March 8, 2026

In the dawn of the new year, Frontier Poetry is excited to announce the 2026 Hurt & Healing Prize.

To harbor life in ourselves is an act of courage. Milenka Aurelio once said that “[our] bodies hold memories, trauma, joy, and potential all at once.” We carry the whole of our histories—both personal and collective—within our bodies. What we carry is not only tranquility, passion, or joy; we also move forward holding it all, and learning to live in a kind of awkward, strange, contradictory, and miraculous harmony with pain. The clumsiness and triumph of this journey is what we call healing—what inspires hope.

With the 2026 Hurt & Healing Prize, we invite you to recall your journeys through the entanglement of pain and restoration. Frontier Poetry seeks poems that explore grief, loss, heartache, and the imperfect path taken to reach the ongoing work of healing. Whether your poetry is authored in the midst of anguish or written from the other side, we welcome work that is transparent, honest, and poetically resonant.

Frontier Poetry welcomes all interpretations of both hurting and healing. We proudly encourage submissions from poets of all identities, cultures, and backgrounds.

Guest judge Gbenga Adesina will select the winners. The first-place winner will receive $3,000 and publication. The second- and third-place winners will receive $300 and $200, respectively, along with publication. All finalists will be considered for paid publication in New Voices.

The contest opens January 5th and closes March 8th, 2026.

Further reading for inspiration can be found here:

The first place winner will receive $3,000 and publication. Second- and third-place winners will receive $300 and $200 respectively, as well as publication.

About Our Judge:

Gbenga Adesina, Nigerian poet and essayist, received his MFA from New York University where he was a Goldwater Poetry Fellowship and was mentored by Yusef Komunyakaa. He has received support from the Poets House, New York; Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown; Colgate University’s Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship; Folger Shakespeare’s Library, Washington DC; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Harlem; and Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University. His work has been published in the Paris Review, Harvard Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, Guernica, Narrative, The Best American Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere, and has been translated into six languages. He is the cofounder and editor of A Long House, a journal of diasporic art, thought, and literature. He received a PhD with emphasis on Poetry from Florida State University and is the inaugural Mellon Foundation Post-doctoral Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic Poetry at the Furious Flower Poetry Center, James Madison University. His debut book of poems, Death Does Not End At The Sea, won the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry.

What our judge is looking for:

I'm looking for surprise and an awareness of language as an architectural device. I'm looking for a voice with multiple rooms inside it. I'm looking for an alertness to the world, a sense of history’s music, and how that music lives publicly and privately inside us. I'm interested in the irreducible fire of a visionary mind that conceives of language as a dance. I want to be compelled by how a poem conceives of hurt and healing, how it subverts our ideas and notions of what it means to hurt or heal, how it collapses and ruptures our neat partitions of these ideas, how it transforms words, experiences, and realities. I want the emotional clarity of a Nina Simone song, the gravitas of a Rap Ellison sentence, and the levitation and grace of a hymn. Actually, scratch all the above, I’m looking for you to, as the kids say, put me in my feels.

Guidelines:

Submissions are open to new and emerging writers (for this contest, we define this as poets with no more than one full-length work of poetry published or forthcoming at the time of submission).

Send up to three poems per submission, for a total of no more than five pages. We have no aesthetic or formal requirements and consider all styles of poetry. Each new submission requires a $20 reading fee.

As part of our dedication to the pursuit of a more inclusive publishing world, we offer a free submission window for poets from historically marginalized groups (BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, disabled community, et cetera) at the beginning of the contest until our cap of fifty.

Do not include any identifying information in the body of your document.

Please submit unpublished poems only.

We welcome simultaneous submissions, but please notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.

You may submit multiple times, but each submission requires a separate $20 fee.

Please provide a brief cover letter that includes a short, third-person bio with your publication history and any applicable content warnings.

Submissions are open internationally, to any poet writing in English. Inclusion of other languages is welcome, as long as the poem is primarily written in English.

Please do not submit work if you have a personal relationship with the judge.

If you haven’t already, please verify your email address with Submittable for more consistent communication.

We will not accept AI-generated work for this contest.

If you have any questions, please visit our FAQ page first. If you don’t find the answer to your question, you can send an email to contact (at) frontierpoetry (dot) com.

Editorial Feedback Option:

This option costs $59 and will provide you with two pages of detailed and actionable feedback on a poem of your choice from your packet, including suggestions for future submissions. The $149 option will provide you with three letters from three different editors. Our guest editors are paid a significant portion of the fee and all are astute and professional poets.

Note on What We Look For

We do not hold preference for any particular style or topic—we simply seek the best poems we can find. Send us work that is blister, that is color, that strikes hot the urge to live and be. For a sense of what we are looking for, read through our previously published poems or What We Look For. We warmly and sincerely invite all voices, and especially those that have been historically marginalized and silenced to submit work.

We also encourage you to submit your poetry for free to our New Voices, open year-round. We pay our emerging NV poets $50 per poem, published every Friday. New Voices is the beating heart of Frontier, and we hope to read your work soon. Thank you so much for supporting the community of new and emerging poets.