Frontier Poetry is excited to invite you to our Summer Poetry Lab, an opportunity designed to help you grow as a writer through personalized editorial feedback, an extensive selection of materials curated for independent learning, and the chance to be connected to and collaborate with other poets.
Below are some highlights of the Poetry Lab program—we’re doing our utmost to pack this opportunity with great material for you!
Working on a chapbook? We're including the digital versions of our chapbook prize winners from the past few years: How Often I Have Chosen Love by Xiao Yue Shan, Shadow Black by Naima Tokunow (selected by Jericho Brown), In the Year of Our Making & Unmaking by Frederick Speers (selected by Carl Phillips), Opportunity Cost by Abby Johnson (selected by Kazim Ali), and In my dreams/I love like an idea by Tyler Raso (selected by Tom Sleigh), paired with guided learning materials about crafting your chapbook. Frontier is so proud of these chapbooks, and we consider them some of our best projects to date.
Want to know how editors evaluate your poems? After interviewing dozens of editors from your favorite magazines, we've got the answers! Every lab participant will have access to over forty pages of advice from editors of publications we all admire: POETRY, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, AGNI, The Adroit Journal, and more. The Frontier team is also continuously working on developing the best practical advice for submitting poets, based on the tens of thousands of submissions we've processed over the past several years. We want to share our current knowledge with you!
Sign up, share up to ten pages of poetry (this sample will give the editor a larger picture of your work, including strengths and weaknesses), and get ready to take your writing seriously.
Natasha Rao is the author of Latitude, which was selected by Ada Limón as the winner of the 2021 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. The recipient of a 2021 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, she has also received fellowships from Bread Loaf, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Community of Writers. Her work appears in The Nation, American Poetry Review, The New York Times Magazine, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. She is currently an Editor of American Chordata.
J. P. Dancing Bear is editor of Verse Daily. He is the author of sixteen collections of poetry, most recently, Of Oracles and Monsters (Glass Lyre Press, 2020), and Fish Singing Foxes (Salmon Poetry, 2019). His work has appeared in American Literary Review, swamp pink, DIAGRAM, and thousands of magazines and anthologies worldwide. He is the founding editor of Dream Horse Press, American Poetry Journal, and the DMQ Review.