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 The wild uncle with outdated views and too much eggnog.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.

Frontier Poetry Lab // Fall 2025

October 1 to October 31, 2025

Fall can be a beautifully inspiring—and incredibly busy—season for writers. With the school year underway, work demands increasing, and the holiday season approaching, finding dedicated time to write can be a challenge. At Frontier Poetry, we strive to remain attuned to both the dreams and realities of our submitters, offering an ever-evolving array of opportunities to support your creative journey.

We’re thrilled to invite you to join the 2025 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, 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 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: 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 ( 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 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. 

Sam Herschel Wein (he/they) is a lollygagging plum of a poet who specializes in perpetual frolicking. They have an MFA from the University of Tennessee and were the recipient of a 2022 Pushcart Prize. Their third chapbook, Butt Stuff Flower Bush, is out now with Porkbelly Press. He co-founded and edits Underblong Journal. They have recent work in Poetry Northwest, The Los Angeles Review, and Puerto del Sol, among others.

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 answering the following prompt: "How would a scholarship to Frontier's Fall Lab benefit you and your writing." To apply, add “2025 Fall Lab Scholarship Request” as the subject of your email. 
• 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 “2025 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.