The 2025 Family & Home Prize

As the holiday season draws near, Frontier Poetry is delighted to announce the 2025 Family & Home Prize.

Family—whether chosen or given—shapes us in ways both tender and tumultuous. It can be a source of origin, belonging, community, and culture, while also holding heartbreak, loss, and complexity. During the holidays, these bonds often feel amplified: the absence of loved ones aches deeper, and their presence glows brighter—despite the occasional chaos. The annual argument before dinner. The uncanny regression that happens the moment we step through the door of our childhood home. The wild uncle with outdated views and too much eggnog.

We’re looking for poetry that pulls up a chair at your family table. The 2025 Family & Home Prize seeks poems that navigate the intimate terrain of family dynamics—rivalries, traditions, estrangements, reconciliations, grief, and love. Whether you're honoring legacy or confronting trauma, send us work that is honest, unflinching, and crafted with poetic precision.

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

Guest judge Sean Hill 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.

This contest opens October 14th and closes December 14th.

Further reading for inspiration can be found here:

• Dwayne | The Poetry Foundation
• In the Hospital | The Poetry Foundation 
• My Own Private Patriarchy | The Poetry Foundation
• Telemachus | Forward Arts Foundation 
• This is How to Make Barah | Honey Literary 
• fishing with dad |diode poetry journal 

About the Guest Judge: 

Sean Hill is the author of the forthcoming multi-genre collection, The Negroes Send Their Love

(Milkweed Editions, 2026), and two poetry collections, Dangerous Goods (Milkweed Editions, 2014), and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor (UGA Press, 2008). Hill has received numerous awards, including fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, Stanford University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Hill’s poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals including Callaloo, New England Review, Orion, and Poetry, and in nearly three dozen anthologies. Hill has served as the director of the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference at Bemidji State University since 2012. Hill lives in southwestern Montana with his family and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Montana.

What Sean Hill Is Looking For:

It’s an honor to judge Frontier’s 2025 Family & Home Prize. A relationship to family and home are two of the many things we all share as human beings. I’m interested in poems that explore the families and homes we’re born to, the ones we choose, and the families that choose us. I remember first encountering Etheridge Knight’s “The Idea of Ancestry” and being moved by how the speaker nearly escaped addiction by going back home to visit family. I was in college then, only seventy miles from my own home, and I felt the poem intensely. Around that same time, I read Heaney’s “Digging,” Komunyakaa’s “My Father’s Love Letters,” and Rita Dove’s “Daystar,” and began to understand other ways of seeing family and home. Poets like Jericho Brown, Remica Bingham-Risher, Donika Kelly, and many others continue to help me think and feel through these themes. I’m excited for what I’ll recognize—or be newly introduced to—about “home” and “family” in your poems.

Guidelines:

• Submissions are open to all poets, regardless of publication history.
• Send us only your best, polished work—unpublished poems only, please.
• As part of our dedication to the pursuit of a more inclusive publishing world, we are offering a free submission window for poets from historically marginalized groups at the beginning of the contest until we reach our cap of fifty. 
• Please do not include any identifying information in the body of your document.
• We accept simultaneous submissions, but please notify us if your work is accepted elsewhere.
• We ask for no more than three poems (five pages) per submission. Please submit all your poems in ONE document. We have no particular aesthetic or formal requirements and consider all styles of poetry.
• Each entry requires a submission fee of $20.
• Multiple submissions (of up to three poems apiece) are allowed, but each requires a separate entry fee.
• Please include a brief cover letter with your publication history and personal bio. Also include any content warnings in consideration of our reading staff.
• Work generated by AI will be automatically disqualified.
• Submissions are open internationally, to any poet writing primarily in English. Some code-switching/meshing is very welcome.
• Please do not submit work if you have a close relationship with the guest judge.
• If you have any questions, please visit our FAQ page. If you don’t find the answer to your question, email us: contact (at ) frontierpoetry (dot) com.
• The deadline is December 14, 2025. We plan to announce winners and finalists in Fall 2025.

Editorial Feedback Option:

This option costs $59 and will provide you with two pages of detailed and actionable feedback on 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 allow eight to ten weeks after the contest closes to receive your feedback.

 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.