Submission Guidelines
Current Poetry Contest
2025 Epistolary Challenge
September 18 to September 28, 2025
"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 18, 2025, and close on September 28, 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- Please submit previously unpublished poems only.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:
New Voices
Always open. Always free.
We are thrilled to offer significant payment to our partner poets: $50 per poem.
We warmly invite poets from historically under-represented and marginalized groups to submit. Our aim is to be an accurate representation of the diversity of our community. Your voice is valued here.
Guidelines
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- Submissions are open to new and emerging poets only (no more than one full-length published work of poetry out in the world or forthcoming at the time of submission. For information about self-published works and pieces published via personal or social media pages, please see our FAQ page below).
- Frontier Poetry does not consider or review AI-generated work. Submissions utilizing AI tools will be automatically declined.
- We accept simultaneous submissions—just please send us a note if your work is picked up elsewhere (we want to say congrats)!
- All submissions must be no more than ten pages and no more than five poems.
- We do not accept multiple submissions. Please submit all your poems in ONE document.
- Please include a cover letter with your publication history.
- Expect eight to twelve weeks for a response.
- To view a list of our most commonly asked questions regarding submitting to us, please see our FAQ page.
Submission Options
- New Voices Free – Always a free way to submit and we always pay for the work. We pay new poets $50 per poem selected. Response time is eight to twelve weeks.
- New Voices Editorial Letter – If you’re interested in knowing a little bit more about what we thought of your poem, utilize this option. When we’ve reviewed your piece we will include one to two pages of feedback on your poem including suggestions for revision, where it might be a good fit for publication, and other comments about ways it can be improved. It’s our way of helping you to understand your work better and improve. Our editors are paid a significant portion of the fee.
- New Voices Fast Response – It can be hard to wait to hear back, so we've developed a quicker turnaround time for writers who want to hear back within two weeks. There is a reading fee for this category.
- New Voices Free Fast Response for BIPOC – Our quick turnaround option offered for free to Black, Indigenous, and other writers of color.
Unless specifically requested, we do not accept AI-generated work.
Author's Rights
Frontier Poetry holds first publication rights for three months after publication, after which rights revert to the author. Authors agree not to publish, nor authorize or permit the publication of, any part of the material for three months following first publication. For reprints, we ask for acknowledgment of publication in Frontier Poetry first.
