The 2025 Epistolary Challenge

"Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were."
—Marcel Proust

Nostalgia is often bittersweet—a cocktail of revisionist memory, faded details, and present-day yearning. Remembering is an imperfect art of patchwork. As writers we are often drawn to the emotional resonances of the past over sequential facts. What we recall is what has shaped and rewired us. We may yearn for the past as it was, but more often, we’re drawn to the thread of feeling that runs through it. 

In that spirit, Frontier Poetry is thrilled to announce the 2025 Epistolary Challenge.

For this ten-day challenge, Frontier seeks poetry written as letters to people, places, objects, and even moments in time. We want to read your letters to the things that stir your nostalgia. The echoes. The aftershocks. The remembered, and the reimagined. True to the spirit of Frontier, we encourage risk-taking: experiment, innovate, break the rules.

Explore examples of epistolary poems below:

• a letter to charlie parker by Dior J. Stephens | Academy of American Poets
• Dear Sister Agnes, by Jacques J. Rancourt | The Poetry Foundation 
• Rewind by Anastasia Taylor-Lind | The Poetry Foundation 
• To a Magazine by Mary Ruefle | Academy of American Poets
• On the Persistence of the Letter as a Form by Paul Guest | Academy of American Poets 
• A Letter to the Girl I Used to Be by Ethan Smith | Button Poetry  

Guidelines:

• The challenge will open on September 18th, 2025, and close on September 28th, 2025.
• 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.
• Do not include any identifying information in the body of your document.
• Send up to three poems per submission. Simply, all three poems must be epistolary poems.
• Please submit previously unpublished poems only.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 (of up to three epistolary poems) requires a separate $20 fee.
• 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.
• Submissions are open internationally, to any poet writing primarily in English. Code-switching/meshing is warmly welcomed.
• If you haven’t already, please verify your email address with Submittable for more consistent communication.
• We will not accept AI-generated or -assisted work for this challenge. Such work will be automatically disqualified.
• 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: