2025 Frontier OPEN

NOW OPEN!

May 5 — June 29, 2025

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To honor the remarkable voices shaping contemporary poetry, Frontier Poetry invites submissions to the 2025 OPEN—our premier prize of the year. This annual competition welcomes both emerging and established poets to share their most resonant work. One outstanding poem will be awarded $5,000 and featured on Frontier’s website where we celebrate poetry that lives on the edge of what language can do.

In addition to the winner, nine finalists will also receive an award of $100 each with publication. The Frontier Poetry editorial team will work together to select winners and finalists for this contest.

While we primarily serve as a platform for new and emerging writers, the OPEN is meant to support and elevate the poetry community as a whole. Every year, we look forward to this prize, for which emerging and established poets are considered in equal measure and as a result are often published side by side in Frontier Poetry. We’re excited to read your work!

The contest is open from May 5, 2025, to June 29, 2025.

Guidelines

• Submissions are open to all poets, regardless of publication history.
• 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 at the beginning of the contest. Please note the portal will close when we hit our cap of fifty submissions; there will be no additional waivers granted.
• Do not include any identifying information in the body of your document
• Send up to three poems per submission, for a total of no more than twelve pages.
• For this contest, we have no aesthetic or formal requirements and will consider all styles of poetry.
• Please submit unpublished poems only. Previously published work will be automatically disqualified.
• Work generated by AI will be automatically disqualified.
• 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 include a brief cover letter that includes a short, third-person bio with your publication history, if applicable. To safeguard our staff, please include any necessary content warnings as well.
• 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. Some code-switching/meshing is warmly welcomed.
• Winners and finalists will be announced in the fall of 2025.
• 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. 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 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.