Frontier Poetry Lab // Spring 2025

March 1 to March 31, 2025

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. The submission window to participate in the lab is March 1, 2025, to March 31, 2025.

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.

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: Good Listener by Kathryn Hargett-Hsu, 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 (can be applied at checkout) which provides a 30% discount on (most) of the books on their site, which can be found HERE.

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 2025 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.

Jaz Sufi (she/hers) is a queer Iranian-American poet and arts educator. Her work has been published or is upcoming in Best New Poets, Best of the Net, AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Muzzle, and elsewhere. She is a National Poetry Slam finalist and has received fellowships from Kundiman, the Watering Hole, and New York University, where she received her MFA. She is the current Poet Laureate of San Ramon, CA, where she lives with her dog, Apollo.

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 “Spring Lab 2025 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 2025 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. 

Healing begins when someone bears witness. I saw you. I believe you.

As poets, we begin our journey by bearing witness. Poetry is the language of observation and we often see signs and symbols in the world that others overlook. But we can’t always stay on the sidelines—sometimes life throws us into the world before we’re ready, which can lead to undue harm. We all feel pain, but the question then becomes: What can we do with it?

The quote above is from Olivia Benson, protagonist of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, played by Mariska Hargitay. The link between this television show and our poetry contest might not be obvious, but Hargitay not only bears witness in her twenty-five year run as Detective Olivia Benson, she commits to protect the most vulnerable among us and fosters a space for healing as well. Her dedication is admirable, and we at Frontier are making the same promise. Let’s not forget that the word “poem” comes from the Greek word for “create.” It’s not just about seeing or believing, it’s about what you make from  what you’ve seen and what you’ve learned. 

This year’s Hurt & Healing Prize is about expressing our pain, but it’s also about celebrating all we have overcome. It is also a call to action—an invitation to support each other in the darkest times. We may feel as if the path forward isn’t clear—but as a community, we answer these questions together.
 

Further reading for inspiration can be found here: 

“Am I Going to Kill My Daughter” | The Poetry Foundation

“Grief” | The Poetry Foundation

“Arthritis is one thing, the hurting another” by Camille T. Dungy - Poems | 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: 

Robert Wood Lynn is a poet from Virginia. He is the author of the collection Mothman Apologia (Yale University Press, 2022) and the chapbook How to Maintain Eye Contact (Button Poetry, 2023). He is the recipient of the 2021 Yale Younger Poets Prize, the 2023 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and a 2023 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship. His work has been featured in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, POETRY, The Yale Review, and other publications. He teaches poetry at Juilliard and Brooklyn Poets.

What our judge is looking for: 

I am honored to be asked to jury Frontier’s poetry contest themed on hurt and healing, because so much of the work of poetry happens in this space of change—hurt and healing not simply or even necessarily as subject but as experience, since that is what a poem is: an experience rather than a recounting. I am interested in poems that wound us gently, or that restore something inside us, or both. Poems that help us reach the interior and emotional spaces no other medium could. That let language work indirectly, through image, metaphor, surprise, and play, to accomplish things impossible in straightforward retelling.

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. This submission category has reached its cap and is now closed.
• 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.

 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.