2026 Portrait Challenge

Think of that iconic portrait. A painting that’s so familiar it’s become part of our collective memory. Maybe you remember that stern glare. Those silver-rimmed glasses. That tight grip on a pitchfork from the stoic depiction of Midwestern farm life in Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.” Maybe you recall that tilting, mournful gaze in Van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Gachet.” Portraiture is the art of capturing—revealing what emerges when a subject is truly witnessed. Through intentional craft, a poet can render a face, depict a landscape, still a fleeting moment, or make a world come alive on the page.

In that vein, Frontier Poetry is excited to announce the 2026 Portrait Challenge. For 10 days we’re inviting poetry that paints an image. From that brutish Wuthering Heights-esque pasture to a portrait of a loved one and their buck tooth when they smile. That image of a sinking city landscape or a shared moment between family friends. We want it all. Join us in celebrating the imagistic nature of poetry and capturing who and what a poet sees. 

The challenge opens September 28 and closes on October 11, 2026.

Every portrait carries the gaze of the maker. We understand that the act of painting a portrait is not neutral, for neither the artist who paints nor the subject who is painted. For that reason, we warmly welcome submissions from all backgrounds and perspectives. 

Explore the 2024 Portrait Prize winners:

• 2024 Portrait Prize WINNER: "Exhibit in Reversal" by Lillian Emerick Valentine
• 2024 Portrait Prize Second Place Winner: "Jared" by Reed Turchi
• 2024 Portrait Prize Third Place Winner: "the one where I watch you walk back into the room" by Allison Norwood

Guidelines:

• The challenge will open on September 28 and close on October 11, 2026.
• 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.
• Send up to three poems per submission. Simply, all three poems must be portrait poems.
• Please submit previously unpublished poems only. Previously published work will be automatically disqualified.
• You may submit multiple times, but each submission (of up to three poems) requires a separate $20 fee.
• We welcome simultaneous submissions, but please notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
• Submissions are open internationally, to any poet writing primarily in English. Code-switching/meshing is warmly welcomed.
• 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.
• Do not include any identifying information in the body of your document.
• We will not accept AI-generated or -assisted work for this challenge. Such work will be automatically disqualified.
• Please do not submit work if you have a close relationship with Frontier’s editors.

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.

Additional Feedback Options

Our editorial commentary costs $12 and will provide you with a few sentences of high level, big picture feedback from one of our astute readers.

The single–letter editorial feedback costs $59 and will provide you with two pages of detailed and actionable feedback by one of our editors on a single poem of your choice from your packet, including suggestions for future submissions. The $149 option will provide you with three letters from three different editors. Our guest editors are paid a significant portion of the fee and all are astute and professional poets. Please allow eight to twelve weeks from the close of the contest to receive your editorial feedback.

Frontier Poetry Lab // Fall 2026

October 1 to October 31, 2026

Fall is creeping back into the calendar. The days are getting shorter, the trees are starting to change after a record-setting summer, and pumpkin spice has made its annual return. At the same time, work has a way of getting louder this time of year: bigger projects, looming deadlines, and the occasional text from your child’s diving coach that somehow requires an immediate response.

Writing can be one of the first things to get pushed aside when everything else gets busy. At Frontier Poetry, we want to give you a reason—and a structure—for keeping it in the mix.

In that vein, we’re thrilled to invite you to join the 2026 Fall Poetry Lab—a unique experience designed to provide personalized editorial feedback, curated learning resources, and the invaluable chance to collaborate with fellow poets during this bustling time of year. Registrations are open from October 1 to October 31, 2026.

This lab is an all-online space where you can get your work edited by our consultants, writers who either have significant publishing experience, work at an MFA program, or work in the publishing industry. 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.

This year, we’re also introducing a new resource for participants: our first-ever forms packet. The packet explores ten classic and experimental poetic forms, offering background on each form alongside definitions, annotated examples, and writing prompts. Whether you already have a relationship with form or tend to avoid it altogether, the packet is meant to give you new ways to approach your writing—and encourage you towards experimentation. 

Below are a few stand out opportunities 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: Explaining a Dress: Transfeminine Erasure and Vindication by Jessie Keary (selected by Nancy Miller Gomez), Good Listener by Kathryn Hargett-Hsu (selected by Kemi Alabi), 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.
• 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!
• 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.

And just when you thought it couldn’t get better…

Akashic Books has generously partnered with us for the month, and all our lab participants will receive a code ( applied during checkout) which provides a 30% discount on (most) of the books on their site, which can be found HERE.

Sign up, submit up to ten pages of poetry, and get ready to take your writing to the next level. This sample gives our editors a fuller picture of your voice, strengths, and opportunities for growth.

Meet the Fall 2026 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 Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Vermont Studio Center. She has received additional support from the Community of Writers, the Hambidge Center, and the VCCA. Her work appears in The Nation, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, 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 Co-Editor of American Chordata.

Memoirist, essayist, and poet Rebecca Evans’ Safe Handling, a collection-length poem, weaves family and heartbreak while navigating our challenging medical industry. Her memoir in verse, Tangled by Blood, bridges motherhood and betrayal, untangling wounds and restoring what it means to be a mother. Evans’ poems and essays have appeared in Narratively, The Rumpus, Brevity, Hypertext Magazine, War, Literature & the Arts, The Limberlost Review, and more. She's earned two MFAs, one in creative nonfiction, the other in poetry, from the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. She’s co-edited an anthology of poems, When There Are Nine, a tribute to the life and achievements of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Moon Tide Press, 2022), She teaches high school teens in the juvenile justice system through journaling and art projects and co-hosts Radio Boise’s “Writer to Writer” show. Rebecca is disabled, a military veteran, and shares space with four Newfoundlands and her sons. She does her best writing in a hidden alcove beneath her stairway.

Sam Herschel Wein (he/they) is a lollygagging plum of a poet who specializes in perpetual frolicking. They have an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Tennessee and were the recipient of a 2022 Pushcart Prize. They have published three chapbooks, most recently Butt Stuff Flower Bush with Porkbelly Press. He co-founded and edits Underblong. Recent poems can be found in the American Poetry Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Shenandoah, among others. They can be found in the cheese aisle of most stores, in the middle of a hug, or editing poems at your local coffee shop.

Nikki Wallschlaeger is the author of four books of poetry as well as a number of chapbooks and an artist book. Her latest books are Waterbaby (Copper Canyon Press, 2021) and Hold Your Own (Copper Canyon Press, 2024). She was a Visiting Professor at the Iowa Writers Workshop in 2022. She lives in the Driftless region of southwest Wisconsin, the country she calls her home. 

Guidelines

• 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.
• All styles and forms of poems are welcome. Please allow up to eight to ten weeks from the close of the lab to receive your feedback.
• Two 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 via contact@frontierpoetry.com with a brief statement to apply and “2026 Fall Lab Scholarship Request” as your subject. 
• All Fall Lab participants will receive a one-time free entry to a Frontier contest of their choice. Please email contact@frontierpoetry.com when you see the contest you’d like to enter with “2026 Fall Lab Free Contest Submission.”

FAQ

How much interaction will I have with the editors?

• 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.

How much interaction will I have with the other participants?

• 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.

Will this help me with my book?

• 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.

Will I have to Zoom or get on the phone?

• 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.

Can I purchase a spot for a friend?

• Yes, please feel welcome. Just make sure to clarify the purpose of your purchase in your cover letter, and please put us in contact with that lucky poet.

 We have a problem in publishing. The 2019 Diversity in Publishing survey found that on average almost 80% of people shaping the publishing industry are white. When this was published, that statistic had not shifted significantly for years. This reality perpetuates the systematic exclusion of historically marginalized writers that will not change unless those with literary platforms and thus some degree of power actively strive to change it.

Toward that end, we at Frontier are offering this space as an opportunity for Black writers, Indigenous writers, and writers of color (BIPOC) to get fast results on their submissions. We'll do our best to get you a decision on your poetry within two to four weeks. Your voice is valued here, and we welcome your work.

These submissions will be considered for our New Voices poetry category.
 

Guidelines

• Submissions are open internationally for historically marginalized BIPOC writers only.
• Submissions are open to new and emerging poets with no more than one full-length published work forthcoming at the time of submission—email us about self-published works)
• We accept simultaneous submissions—just please send us a note via Submittable 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 brief cover letter with your publication history, if any.
• Expect two to four weeks for a response.
• Publication in our New Voices category includes a payment of $50 per poem.
• Please review our FAQ page for more information. Almost all other questions are answered here: www.frontierpoetry.com/faq
   

Submissions for our New Voices poetry category are open year round to any new and emerging poet who has not published more than one full-length collection of poetry. New Voices are published online only and will feature a number of poems from new authors each month.

We are thrilled to offer significant payment to our partner poets: $50 per poem, up to $150. We are proud to be paying for  published pieces but will be highly selective in our choices for  publication.

We also warmly invite under-represented and marginalized voices to submit. Our aim is to be an accurate representation of the diversity of our beautiful community. Your voice is valued here.

Guidelines

• Submissions are open to new and emerging poets only  (no more than two full-length published works forthcoming at the time of submission—email us about self-published works)
• 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 six to eight weeks for a response
• Please review our FAQ page for more information. Almost all other questions are answered here: www.frontierpoetry.com/faq

Editorial Feedback Option

This option costs $59 and will provide you with two pages of detailed and actionable feedback on a poem of your choice from the submission, including suggestions for future submissions. Our guest editors are paid a significant portion of the fee (at EFA rates) and are all incredibly astute and professional poets. Please note, the time frame for Ed Letters is eight to twelve weeks from the time of submission.