2023 Annual Poetry Contest

Our 2023 contest is open until April 15th
$500 First Prize
$200 Second Prize
$100 Third Prize
Author Pic Garden

We are thrilled to announce that our 2023 Poetry Contest Judge will be Oliver de la Paz.

Oliver de la Paz is the Poet Laureate of Worcester, Massachusetts, for 2023-2025. He is the author and editor of seven books: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, Post Subject: A Fable, and The Boy in the Labyrinth, a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry. His newest work, The Diaspora Sonnets, is forthcoming from Liveright Press in 2023.

With Stacey Lynn Brown, he co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry.

A founding member, Oliver serves as the cochair of the Kundiman advisory board. He has received grants from the NEA, NYFA, the Artist’s Trust, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and has been awarded multiple Pushcart Prizes. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at PLU.

(Photo credit: Meredith Pugh)

There is a $15 fee

Submissions Guidelines

Thank you for your patience while we changed from a print magazine to an online one. We hope this will enable us to publish more good writing, and we welcome regular submissions from September 1st to May 1st, contest submissions from January to mid-April.

We close submissions from May 2 to August 31st in order to catch up on reading.

For regular submissions, send us three to five poems in a single document, please! 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 one per submission; your manuscript should be no longer than 12 pages, double-spaced.

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 (except in our annual poetry contest), but we do not accept previously published work. If you intend to submit work simultaneously, it would be kind of you to tell us so in your cover letter. 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. 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.

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

To submit work electronically, including contest entries:

submit