Poetry Awards
Welcome to the 2023 Award for New Poets!
New and emerging poets, this is your moment to shine!
Award for New Poets
This fall, we’re delighted to bring back our Award for New Poets! We’re looking to uplift an up-and-coming poet, with no more than one full-length collection forthcoming or published at the time of submission. We award $3,000 for the winning poem, selected by our guest judge. Our second- and third-place winners receive $300 and $200, respectively. All three winners will be published.
Our judge this year is torrin a. greathouse, whose “Burning Haibun” Frontier Poetry first published in 2017, and who is now an award-winning poet and professor. We love seeing a poet’s origins and the many ways they move and grow in their work, and this award is an opportunity for us to help you along that path! Send us your innovative poems, your passion projects, the work you can’t wait for the world to share in!
About Our Judge
torrin a. greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist. She received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota. Their work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, the New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Effing Foundation for Sex Positivity, Zoeglossia, the Ragdale Foundation, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. They are the author of Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020), winner of the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and DEED (Wesleyan University Press, 2024). She teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.Guidelines
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Submissions are open to new and emerging writers (for this contest, we define this as poets with no more than one full-length published work forthcoming at the time of submission).
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As part of our dedication to the pursuit of a more inclusive publishing world, there is a free submission window for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, person of color) poets at the beginning of the contest until our cap of fifty. Please note the portal will close when we hit our cap.
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Do not include any identifying information in the body of your document.
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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.
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Please submit unpublished poems only.
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We welcome simultaneous submissions, but please notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
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You may submit multiple times, but each submission requires a separate $20 fee.
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Please provide a brief cover letter that includes a short, third-person bio with your publication history and any applicable content warnings.
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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.
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Please do not submit work if you have a personal relationship with the judge.
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If you haven't already, please verify your email address with Submittable for more consistent communication.
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We will not accept AI-generated work for this contest.
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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.
Included Opportunities and Discounts
As a thank you for your support for Frontier, we've partnered with Alice James Books to offer a 25% discount code on any of their pre-order books! Go to www.alicejamesbooks.org to find amazing new work and use the code provided in your confirmation email during 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.
