2024 Spring Poetry Lab
CLOSED!
Thank you for submitting to our
2024 Spring Poetry Lab!
Frontier Poetry is excited to invite you to our Spring 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, as well as the chance to collaborate with other poets and participate in an optional end-of-lab open mic. The submission window to participate in the lab was March 1, 2024, to March 31, 2024.
This lab is an all-online space where you can get your work edited by our consultants, writers who either work in publishing and evaluate poems for a living or work as faculty at MFA programs around the country. Our consultants have likely published some of your favorite contemporary poets or worked alongside them! They will apply their expertise to your poems, providing in-depth developmental feedback that will help your best work find its way to the page. Our consultants receive a significant portion of the lab fee.
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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), and Opportunity Cost by Abby Johnson (selected by Kazim Ali), 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.
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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 Magazine, 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!
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Want some advice on where else to submit? Let us help—we will send you a list of journals that could be a good fit for your particular voice. Every participant will get individualized recommendations from our experienced team.
Sign up, share up to ten pages of poetry (this sample will give the editor a larger picture of your work, including strengths and opportunities), and get ready to take your writing more seriously.
If you need an extension on the deadline, please email contact@frontierpoetry.com.
Meet the Spring 2024 Poetry Lab Consultants
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 and 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, 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.
Rebecca Evans writes the difficult, the heart-full, the guidebooks for survivors. Her work has appeared in Narratively, The Rumpus, Brevity,and more. She's earned two MFAs, one in creative nonfiction, the other in poetry, at University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. She’s authored a full-length poetry collection, Tangled by Blood (Moon Tide Press, 2023), and has a second poetry book, Safe Handling, forthcoming (Moon Tide Press, 2024). She shares space with four Newfoundlands and her sons in a tiny Idaho town.
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Please submit up to ten pages of poetry. In formatting your packet of poems, please use a standard font size and do not include more than one poem per page.
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All styles and forms of poems are welcome. Please allow up to eight weeks from the close of the lab to receive your feedback.
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Four full scholarships will be reserved for poets from historically marginalized groups. If this is you and our fee is a barrier to participation, please email our team contact@frontierpoetry.com with a brief statement to apply and “Spring Lab 2024 Scholarship Request” as your subject.
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All Spring Lab participants will receive a one-time free entry to a Frontier contest of choice. Please email contact@frontierpoetry.com when you see the contest you’d like to enter with “Spring Lab 2024 Free Contest Submission.”
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All Spring Lab participants will also be invited to read at an online open mic during Summer 2024 to celebrate your work! Details TBD.
FAQ
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Each participant will be assigned one editor who reviews their work. For accessibility and convenience, we've designed this program with the aim to be completely asynchronous and digital—you will submit your poems, and then your editor will write their feedback and send it back. After that, any continued conversation is at the editor's personal discretion.
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Entirely up to you! The lab is designed to be open to complete independence or group participation. After getting your learning materials, you'll be asked if you'd like to join a group to work through them together. The Frontier team will help create the groups according to level of experience and other factors, after which it is in the participants’ hands to figure out a working schedule and style that makes sense to the group.
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Perhaps! But this lab is not a manuscript editing service. The aim is to provide holistic advice on writing poems through direct personalized feedback and a self-guided and rigorous study of the craft.
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Only if you want to participate in the open mic! Otherwise, this lab will be handled entirely through Submittable. We will send you your packet of lab materials soon after you submit. The timing of the feedback depends on the editor’s availability, but it should not be longer than eight to ten weeks after the close of the lab’s submission period.
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Yes, please feel welcome. Just make sure to make the purpose of your purchase clear in your cover letter, and please put us in contact with that lucky poet.
