Poetry Awards
We're now accepting submissions for the 2023 Frontier OPEN! We look forward to reading your work!
2023 Frontier OPEN
In our pursuit to celebrate the outstanding poets of our present times, Frontier annually hosts a prize for all poets, regardless of publication history. We invite you to send your best work to the OPEN, our biggest prize of the year! The winning poem will be awarded $5,000 and publication.
In addition to the winner, nine finalists will also receive an award of $100 each with publication. The Frontier 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!
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 BIPOC poets at the beginning of the contest until our cap of fifty. Please note this portal will close when we hit our cap.
- 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. We have no aesthetic or formal requirements and consider all styles of poetry.
- Please submit unpublished poems only.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 include a brief cover letter that includes a short, third-person bio with your publication history.
- 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.
- Winners and finalists will be announced in the fall of 2023.
- 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 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.
Included Opportunities and Discounts
As a thank you for your support for Frontier, we've partnered with The Poetry School to offer every submitter a 20% off discount code (average of $28 value) to one of their online courses! Head to their platform, find a course you're interested in, and use the code included in your confirmation message at checkout.
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.
