2026 Portrait Challenge

September 28 to October 11, 2026

The 2026 Portrait Challenge

Think of that iconic portrait. A painting that’s so familiar it’s become part of our collective memory. Maybe you remember that stern glare. Those silver-rimmed glasses. That tight grip on a pitchfork from the stoic depiction of Midwestern farm life in Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.” Maybe you recall that tilting, mournful gaze in Van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Gachet.” Portraiture is the art of capturing—revealing what emerges when a subject is truly witnessed. Through intentional craft, a poet can render a face, depict a landscape, still a fleeting moment, or make a world come alive on the page.

In that vein, Frontier Poetry is excited to announce the 2026 Portrait Challenge. For 10 days we’re inviting poetry that paints an image. From that brutish Wuthering Heights-esque pasture to a portrait of a loved one and their buck tooth when they smile. That image of a sinking city landscape or a shared moment between family friends. We want it all. Join us in celebrating the imagistic nature of poetry and capturing who and what a poet sees.

The challenge opens September 28 and closes on October 11, 2026.

Every portrait carries the gaze of the maker. We understand that the act of painting a portrait is not neutral, for neither the artist who paints nor the subject who is painted. For that reason, we warmly welcome submissions from all backgrounds and perspectives.

Explore the 2024 Portrait Prize winners:

Guidelines:

The challenge will open on September 28 and close on October 11, 2026.
Three winners will be chosen by our editorial staff. The first-place winner will receive $500, with the second- and third-place winners receiving $200 and $100, respectively. All winners will be published on Frontier’s website.
For this challenge, submissions are open to new and emerging 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. Simply, all three poems must be portrait poems.
Please submit previously unpublished poems only. Previously published work will be automatically disqualified.
You may submit multiple times, but each submission (of up to three poems) requires a separate $20 fee.
We welcome simultaneous submissions, but please notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
Submissions are open internationally, to any poet writing primarily in English. Code-switching/meshing is warmly welcomed.
Please provide a brief cover letter that includes a short, third-person bio with your publication history, as well as any applicable content warnings to safeguard our reading staff.
Do not include any identifying information in the body of your document.
We will not accept AI-generated or -assisted work for this challenge. Such work will be automatically disqualified.
Please do not submit work if you have a close relationship with Frontier’s editors.

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.

Additional Feedback Options

Our editorial commentary costs $12 and will provide you with a few sentences of high level, big picture feedback from one of our astute readers.

The single–letter editorial feedback costs $59 and will provide you with two pages of detailed and actionable feedback by one of our editors on a single 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. Please allow eight to twelve weeks from the close of the contest to receive your editorial feedback.

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.