2025 Contest

April 15, 2025

$500 First Prize

$200 Second Prize

$100 Third Prize

We are thrilled to announce the winners selected by our 2025 Annual Poetry Contest Judge, Donald Revell:

First Prize ($500): Elisabeth Preston-Hsu, "Zooxanthellae"

"This poem beautifully coaxes Vision out of Fact, gently but powerfully proposing an ethical imperative that turns out to be a spiritual imperative as well."

Second Prize ($200): Hilary King, "Poem with Kelp and Regret"

"In a way that truly reminds me of Dickinson, this poem converts matters of mortality into a peep into eternity. Very quietly, very subtly, disappointment acquires a nimbus of courage."

Third Prize ($100): Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, "Scaffolding"

"I am enthralled by the syllabic magic of this poem, by the way the poet adventures blank verse measures with a natural authority and tact. This poem revels in the juxtapositions of abstraction with plain speaking in a way that can be downright Shakespearian!"

Honorable Mention: Katharyn Howd Machan, "How Spiders Travel"

"There is a daring insouciance about this poem that makes it immediately convincing, immediately trustworthy. The lines manage a tenderness that is entirely free of irony, and which therefore moves me deeply."

Our sincere thanks to everyone who entered the contest. We will be accepting some of those poems for our Spring/Summer issue, which will come out in July.

Donald Revell is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, most recently Canandaigua, six volumes of translations from the French, and three volumes of critical writings, including Essay: A Critical Memoir. A former Fellow of the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations, he is the winner of the PEN USA Translation Award and two-time winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry, and he has twice been awarded Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

$15.00

Submissions Guidelines

We welcome regular submissions from September 1st to May 1st, and contest submissions from January to mid-March.

For regular submissions, send us three to five poems in a single document, please! They should be your own original work.

For contest submissions, three is the maximum.

We look for well-crafted poems under 61 lines. Poems should be single-spaced indicating stanza breaks.

We are also looking for creative non-fiction and short stories. Just send us a submission that is no longer than 12 pages (so you could send a single story or a small group of flash fiction pieces), double-spaced, and NOT in a PDF.

We accept work via Submittable. Please include a short bio (50 words or so).

We will not be able to read Snail-mail manuscripts, so please do not send us any.

We are happy to accept simultaneous submissions, but we do not accept previously published work. Once we have notified you of an acceptance, it will be published as a first time publication. All rights revert back to you, the author, after publication.

We read all submissions, but that process takes time and we are overworked. This is one reason we encourage simultaneous submissions–if your work is snapped up elsewhere by a more efficient magazine, we will be thrilled for you. Just let us know as soon as you know.

We close submissions from May 2 to August 31st in order to catch up on reading. We apologize for any delays. 2020-2021 almost crushed us, and Fall 2023 brought some personal losses. but we're doing better now, with wonderful readers and interns.

If you have questions, please contact us! (That is NOT the address to send poems to, however.)

To submit work electronically, including contest entries: