Welcome home, poet.
Frontier Poetry began with the simple mission of being a platform for emerging poets—to uplift, to prepare, and to inspire.
We are looking for poets and poems that strive to place themselves at the edge of what language can do. This does not mean we are only concerned with experimental poetry. We believe sonnets can be at the frontier, book-length poems can be at the frontier, confessional poetry can be at the frontier—as long as a piece is constructed with exceptional consideration for language, craft, and heart, that poem is a fit for us.
Work by new and underrepresented voices is one of our priorities in publication. We take our role as a mediating platform between poet and world seriously and strive to use this role as fairly and justly as we can. The frontier land of poetry, that distant landscape where all voices can be heard clearly and in abundance, where poets from all contexts feel empowered to step into their writing—we seek that place, and hope to plant ourselves in its beauty.
By submitting to Frontier Poetry, submitters agree to receive correspondence about new work and submission opportunities from Frontier Poetry. You can unsubscribe at any time.
**If you haven't already, please verify your email address with Submittable for more consistent communication.**
Unless specifically requested, we do not accept AI-generated work.
2024 Nature & Place Prize
February 22, 2024, to April 28, 2024
In our pursuit of gentleness, nostalgia, and a reimagining of “home,” Frontier Poetry is reviving the Nature & Place Prize. In her poem “Drowning Creek,” Ada Limón takes us into the countryside, “Past the strip malls and the power plants, / out of the holler, past Gun Bottom Road / and Brassfield and before Red Lick Creek, / there’s a stream called Drowning Creek….” On her journey, she has the strong urge to stop the car and observe the kingfisher perched on the transmission wire “eyeing the creek / for crayfish, tadpoles, and minnows.” She has aptly combined the urge to be in communion with nature, with the visceral landscape of place observed from the loneliness of a car ride. In this same vein, we invite you to submit work to the 2024 Nature & Place Prize.
We’re looking for poems rich and robust in language, technique, and form that pay homage to the natural world and all of the small marvels that occur in nature. We’re also interested in poems that observe geography and the landscape of home. Frontier Poetry warmly encourages poets of all backgrounds, identities, and ethnicities to enter.
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. All shortlisted writers will also be considered for paid publication in New Voices.
About the Guest Judge:
Flower Conroy is a LGBTQIA+ artist, NEA and MacDowell Fellow, and former Key West Poet Laureate. Conroy’s books include Snake Breaking Medusa Disorder (winner of the Stevens Manuscript Prize), A Sentimental Hairpin (Eric Hoffer Finalist), and Greenest Grass (winner of the Blue Lynx Poetry prize). Her work has appeared/is forthcoming in New England Review, American Literary Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Currently she is curating a series of Ephemeral Altars that celebrate poetry collections through assemblage art.
What Flower Is Looking For:
When I initially heard the theme “Nature & Place,” I had a confident (albeit vague) idea what that might mean; however, the more I thought about it, my sense of nature and place became excitingly less certain, amorphous, vast. I want (from these submissions) what I’d want from any poem: I want to encounter that which I didn’t know I needed to encounter; I want surprise of detail and syntax, for a microcosm of a perspective and language (or languages) to flesh out a world I get lost in, to be entranced by keenness of being and experience retold; I want nuance, subtext, and imagery to awe me. The theme of "Nature & Place" strikes me as abstractly concrete and concretely abstract—it conjures landscape, yes, but perhaps landscape as a presence in relation to a self or selves. It’s flesh and dirt, past and future, internal and external. I’ve no preconceived notions of what the poems should be beyond being visceral.
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 note the free portal will close when we hit our submission cap.
- 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 April 28, 2024. We plan to announce winners and finalists in Summer 2024.
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.
Frontier Poetry is excited to invite you to our Spring Poetry Lab, an opportunity designed to help you grow as a writer through personalized editorial feedback, an extensive selection of materials curated for independent learning, as well as the chance to collaborate with other poets and participate in an optional end-of-lab open mic. The submission window to participate in the lab is March 1, 2024, to March 31, 2024.
This lab is an all-online space where you can get your work edited by our consultants, writers who either work in publishing and evaluate poems for a living or work as faculty at MFA programs around the country. Our consultants have likely published some of your favorite contemporary poets or worked alongside them! 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.
Below are some highlights 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: 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.
Sign up, share up to ten pages of poetry (this sample will give the editor a larger picture of your work, including strengths and opportunities), and get ready to take your writing more seriously.
If you need an extension on the deadline, please email contact@frontierpoetry.com.
Meet the Spring 2024 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 Vermont Studio Center, and the Community of Writers. Her work appears inThe Nation, American Poetry Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. She is currently an Editor of American Chordata.
Rebecca Evans writes the difficult, the heart-full, the guidebooks for survivors. Her work has appeared inNarratively, The Rumpus, Brevity,and more. She's earned two MFAs, one in creative nonfiction, the other in poetry, University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. She’s authored a full-length poetry collection,Tangled by Blood(Moon Tide Press, 2023), and has a second poetry book,Safe Handling, forthcoming (Moon Tide Press, 2024). She shares space with four Newfoundlands and her sons in a tiny Idaho town.
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 weeks from the close of the lab to receive your feedback.
- Four 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 contact@frontierpoetry.com with a brief statement to apply and “Spring Lab 2024 Scholarship Request” as your subject.
- All Spring Lab participants will receive a one-time free entry to a Frontier contest of choice. Please email contact@frontierpoetry.com when you see the contest you’d like to enter with “Spring Lab 2024 Free Contest Submission.”
- All Spring Lab participants will also be invited to read at an online open mic during Summer 2024 to celebrate your work! Details TBD.
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?
- Only if you want to participate in the open mic! Otherwise, 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 make the purpose of your purchase clear 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.