The 2025 (Not) in Love Haiku Challenge 

"Stronger than lover's love is lover's hate. Incurable, in each, the wounds they make.”

― Euripides, Medea

We understand that the Valentine’s Day season—the candy hearts, Hallmark quotes, and the flood of partners to the flower section to buy overpriced red roses—can be taxing. Some feel less Nicholas Sparks-esque and more in the realm of a Stephen King horror. A dedicated time to appreciate love is great but the near-constant pressure to find or express love can sometimes dredge up old flings we'd rather forget-- that we find sickening upon reflection. Here at Frontier Poetry, we’re looking for something a little more bitter, vengeful and potent

In that spirit, Frontier Poetry is thrilled to announce the 2025 (Not) in Love Haiku Challenge. 

The challenge will open on February 5th, 2026, and close on February 15th, 2026.

For this ten-day challenge, Frontier seeks poetry written as Haiku—a Japanese poem of seventeen syllables, in three lines of five, seven, and five. While traditional haiku typically engages the natural world, we’re looking for risk taking, experimentation, and surprise as you work in this classic form. Send us poems that would provoke Saint Valentine. We’re looking for poetry that explores the people, places, and things you have a love-hate relationship with. Consider this a condensed version of your lengthier diss track; we can't wait to listen!

Explore examples of haiku poems below:

• Untitled/無題 | The Poetry Foundation
• Malu Cycles/瑪璐循環 | Poetry Foundation
• David Trinidad (Basho) | Unwoven Literary Mag
• [goes out comes back] | The Poetry Foundation 
• [all the time I pray to Buddha] | The Poetry Foundation 

Guidelines:

• The challenge will open on February 5th, 2026, and close on February 15th, 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.
• Do not include any identifying information in the body of your document.
• Send up to five poems per submission. Simply, all five poems must be haiku 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• Please submit previously unpublished poems only.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 five haiku poems) requires a separate $10 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:

This option costs $59 and will provide you with two pages of detailed and actionable feedback on one poem in your submission, 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 note, the time frame for editorial letters is eight to twelve weeks from the close of the challenge.

2026 Hurt & Healing Prize

In the dawn of the new year, Frontier Poetry is excited to announce the 2026 Hurt & Healing Prize.

To harbor life in ourselves is an act of courage. Milenka Aurelio once said that “[our] bodies hold memories, trauma, joy, and potential all at once.” We carry the whole of our histories—both personal and collective—within our bodies. What we carry is not only tranquility, passion, or joy; we also move forward holding it all, and learning to live in a kind of awkward, strange, contradictory, and miraculous harmony with pain. The clumsiness and triumph of this journey is what we call healing—what inspires hope.

With the 2026 Hurt & Healing Prize, we invite you to recall your journeys through the entanglement of pain and restoration. Frontier Poetry seeks poems that explore grief, loss, heartache, and the imperfect path taken to reach the ongoing work of healing. Whether your poetry is authored in the midst of anguish or written from the other side, we welcome work that is transparent, honest, and poetically resonant.

Frontier Poetry welcomes all interpretations of both hurting and healing. We proudly encourage submissions from poets of all identities, cultures, and backgrounds.

Guest judge Gbenga Adesina will select the winners. The first-place winner will receive $3,000 and publication. The second- and third-place winners will receive $300 and $200, respectively, along with publication. All finalists will be considered for paid publication in New Voices.

The contest opens January 5th and closes March 8th, 2026.

Further reading for inspiration can be found here:

OBIT | The Poetry Foundation

Siri as Mother | Academy of American Poets 

UPON RECEIVING THE NEWS LOOKING OUT THE KITCHEN WINDOW | Frontier Poetry 

I begin the day thinking | Academy of American Poets 

The first place winner will receive $3,000 and publication. Second- and third-place winners will receive $300 and $200 respectively, as well as publication.  

About Our Judge:

Gbenga Adesina, Nigerian poet and essayist, received his MFA from New York University where he was a Goldwater Poetry Fellowship and was mentored by Yusef Komunyakaa. He has received support from the Poets House, New York; Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown; Colgate University’s Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship; Folger Shakespeare’s Library, Washington DC; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Harlem; and Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University. His work has been published in the Paris Review, Harvard Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, Guernica, Narrative, The Best American Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere, and has been translated into six languages. He is the cofounder and editor of A Long House, a journal of diasporic art, thought, and literature. He received a PhD with emphasis on Poetry from Florida State University and is the inaugural Mellon Foundation Post-doctoral Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic Poetry at the Furious Flower Poetry Center, James Madison University. His debut book of poems, Death Does Not End At The Sea, won the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry. 

What our judge is looking for:

I'm looking for surprise and an awareness of language as an architectural device. I'm looking for a voice with multiple rooms inside it. I'm looking for an alertness to the world, a sense of history’s music, and how that music lives publicly and privately inside us. I'm interested in the irreducible fire of a visionary mind that conceives of language as a dance. I want to be compelled by how a poem conceives of hurt and healing, how it subverts our ideas and notions of what it means to hurt or heal, how it collapses and ruptures our neat partitions of these ideas, how it transforms words, experiences, and realities. I want the emotional clarity of a Nina Simone song, the gravitas of a Rap Ellison sentence, and the levitation and grace of a hymn. Actually, scratch all the above, I’m looking for you to, as the kids say, put me in my feels.

Guidelines:

• Submissions are open to new and emerging writers (for this contest, we define this as 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, for a total of no more than five pages. We have no aesthetic or formal requirements and consider all styles of poetry. Each new submission requires a $20 reading fee.
• As part of our dedication to the pursuit of a more inclusive publishing world, we offer a free submission window for poets from historically marginalized groups (BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, disabled community, et cetera) at the beginning of the contest until our cap of fifty. Submission cap met. 
• Do not include any identifying information in the body of your document.
• Please submit 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 requires a separate $20 fee.
• Please provide a brief cover letter that includes a short, third-person bio with your publication history and any applicable content warnings.
• Submissions are open internationally, to any poet writing in English. Inclusion of other languages is welcome, as long as the poem is primarily written in English.
• Please do not submit work if you have a personal relationship with the judge.
• If you haven’t already, please verify your email address with Submittable for more consistent communication.
• We will not accept AI-generated work for this contest.
• 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:

This option costs $59 and will provide you with two pages of detailed and actionable feedback on a 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.

The 2026 Debut Chapbook Prize 

March 9, 2026, to May 10, 202

Frontier Poetry is offering a reduced entry fee of $15 to any historically marginalized poets until we hit our cap of fifty. Please only use this submission form if you fit this category. 

The 2026 Debut Chapbook Prize

“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” — Franz Kafka

According to Flannery O’Connor, writing is an act of discovery—an unveiling of what remains unresolved, what has yet to be turned over. Victor Hugo once said there is a world trapped in each writer. Larger collections curate the memories, people, passions, and images that return to our writing again and again. Frontier Poetry is ready to invite your poetry—something not bent, not watered down. With this contest, we seek writing that honors your most merciless obsessions: your chapbook.

This spring, Frontier Poetry is excited to announce the 2026 Debut Chapbook Prize. For the first time in more than a year, the Frontier Editorial Team seeks poetry collections of no more than 30 pages that center a clearly envisioned and executed theme, motif, and/or throughline.

We’re looking for your untold stories—chapbooks that break the rules in service of your work and voice. We warmly invite submissions from writers of all backgrounds.

Guest judge Patricia Smith will select one winner, who will receive a $2,000 prize and publication, including a free downloadable digital chapbook on our website, fifty physical author copies to share and sell, and the option to enable drop-shipping sales through Amazon, Bookshop.org, and Barnes & Noble, earning 50% royalties. Thousands of readers, editors, and magazines will also receive access to the chapbook through our newsletter. Our goal is to offer a catalytic stepping stone to help launch your poetic career.

The contest opens March 9, 2026, and closes May 10th, 2026

About Our Judge:

What Our Judge is Looking For:

Guidelines for Submission:

• For this contest, we are specifically looking for poets with no prior chapbook, manuscript, or full-length collection of poetry published or forthcoming prior to this contest.
• Writers from historically marginalized groups are welcome to submit for a reduced fee until we reach our cap of fifty. No additional fee waivers will be granted.
• The manuscript should be fifteen to thirty pages of poems, not including front and back matter.
• The manuscript should be unpublished as a whole, although individual poems may be previously published.
• Do not include any identifying information in the manuscript itself or in the file name.
• Please put any acknowledgements in the cover letter field of Submittable and not in the manuscript.
• Submissions are open internationally, to any poet writing in English. Inclusion of other languages, such as in code-switching/meshing, is welcome, as long as the poem is primarily in English.
• Simultaneous submissions are welcome, but please notify us immediately if the chapbook is accepted elsewhere.
• Multiple submissions are allowed, but each manuscript must be submitted separately with the $25 reading fee.
• Work generated by AI will be automatically disqualified.
• Winners and finalists will be announced late summer of 2026.

Editorial Feedback Option:

Two options for feedback are available: Editorial Letter and Manuscript Consultation.

• For practical feedback on a single poem from the collection, choose Editorial Letter (one to two pages of developmental feedback on a single poem in the submitted collection).
• For an in-depth editorial service on the manuscript as a whole, choose Manuscript Consultation (ten to fifteen pages of feedback plus a phone or email consultation).

Our guest editors are paid a significant portion of the fee and are all astute, professional poets.

Testimonial for the Manuscript Consultation: “Meeting with a Frontier Poetry editor was well worth it. Poems need to be read out loud and to be heard by more than one person. And if that second listener is generous and curious and knows where to point to a better order and when a line needs torque or the junk pile, then there’s a chance for mere words, that mere air, to sound delicious.”

Frontier Poetry’s Chapbook Catalog:

You can read the winners of our previous chapbook contests here:

• Explaining a Dress by Jessie Keary (2024)
• Good Listener by Kathryn Hargett-Hsu (2023)
• Opportunity Cost by Abby Johnson (2021)
• In the Year of Our Making & Unmaking by Frederick Speers (2020)

Testimonial for the Chapbook Process: “Working with Frontier to bring my debut chapbook to life was an absolute dream! It was an ideal collaboration. I felt fully supported in their commitment to my vision. The talent of the exterior and interior designers of the chapbook really brought it all together.  Emelie and Michaela listened to my input, but their own creativity made the final product even better than I could have imagined. I deeply appreciate the whole team’s attention to detail and overall thoughtfulness. They emphasized my own artistic agency and voice. I will always treasure working with Frontier and the beautiful chapbook that was produced. They totally captured the spirit of my work, and I am forever grateful!” 

— Jessie Keary 

If you have any questions, please visit our FAQ page. If you don’t find the answer to your question, you can send an email to contact (at) frontierpoetry (dot) com.

 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.