2026 Devotion & Divination Prize

“The dead are not dead. / They are pinned to each / siren—hot pink, / green, white, white—like / beaks to a wire.” 

—Hala Alyan, “Interactive :: House Saints”

Think of a moment when the ordinary world feels, briefly, unmistakably charged. Hearing your dead great uncle’s voice near the kitchen sink when the house is completely empty. That recurring dream with plum poppies that feels eerily relevant to your love life. The horoscope that read “avoid shopping after 10:00 p.m.” that you know saved you from something catastrophic. Sometimes, it’s that family ritual—lighting a candle, kneeling down before your god—that offers you a respite of peace. Or it's the opposite. A religious upbringing that’s left you with unanswered questions. 

Spirituality is the concrete world revealing something that feels mystical. And, on occasion, that mystical realm reaches back.

In that vein, Frontier Poetry is excited to announce the 2026 Devotion & Divination Prize. For this contest we’re inviting poets to explore their relationship to spirituality and the supernatural. 

Send us your poems about God(s), ghosts, conjurings, and prophecy. We want to read your poems rooted in traditional religious practice, personal ritual, inherited belief, or the complete absence of belief. This contest welcomes mystery and the innumerable ways we seek to embrace, understand, or withstand the unknown. 

Guest Judge Hala Alyan will select the winners. The first-place winner will receive $3,000 and publication. 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.

Submissions open October 12 and close December 13, 2026.

There are no boundaries around what spirituality can look like. Poets of all spiritual backgrounds—and those whose relationships to belief are complicated, evolving, or uncertain—are warmly encouraged to submit.

Further reading for inspiration can be found here: 

• God-Country by Tina Chang | The Poetry Foundation
• First Offering by Adedayo Adeyemi Agarau | African Poetry Book Fund 
• Interactive :: House Saints by Hala Alyan | The Poetry Foundation
• Ode to My Aunt's Last Words / In Front of Me is Death and I Can't Help But Disassociate by Chandanie Somwaru | Hey Zine 

About the Guest Judge: 

Hala Alyan is the author of the novels Salt Houses—winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize—and The Arsonists’ City, a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Her debut memoir, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of five highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Twenty-Ninth Year and The Moon That Turns You Back. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.

What Alyan Is Looking For:

I’m looking for a poem that startles me into a kind of awakeness, something alive on the page. I’m drawn to surprising, precise imagery and uses of language that feel unusual. I also listen for cadence: a poem should have an energy and musicality that reveals itself when read aloud.

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.
• For this contest, we have no aesthetic or formal requirements and will consider all styles of poetry.
• Please submit unpublished poems only. Previously published work will be automatically disqualified.
• You may submit multiple times, but each submission requires a separate $20 fee.
• We welcome simultaneous submissions, but please notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
• 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 at the beginning of the contest. Please note the portal will close when we hit our cap of fifty submissions; there will be no additional waivers granted.
• 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. Some code-switching/meshing is warmly welcomed.
• Please include a brief cover letter that includes a short, third-person bio with your publication history, if applicable. To safeguard our staff, please include any necessary content warnings as well.
• Do not include any identifying information in the body of your document.
• Work generated by AI will be automatically disqualified.
• Please do not submit work if you have a close relationship with Frontier’s editors or the guest judge.
• Winners and finalists will be announced in the winter of 2027.

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.

Additional Feedback Options

The single–letter editorial feedback costs $59 and will provide you with two pages of detailed and actionable feedback by one of our editors on a single 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. Please allow eight to twelve weeks from the close of the contest to receive your editorial feedback.

2026 Devotion & Divination Prize

“The dead are not dead. / They are pinned to each / siren—hot pink, / green, white, white—like / beaks to a wire.” 

—Hala Alyan, “Interactive :: House Saints”

Think of a moment when the ordinary world feels, briefly, unmistakably charged. Hearing your dead great uncle’s voice near the kitchen sink when the house is completely empty. That recurring dream with plum poppies that feels eerily relevant to your love life. The horoscope that read “avoid shopping after 10:00 p.m.” that you know saved you from something catastrophic. Sometimes, it’s that family ritual—lighting a candle, kneeling down before your god—that offers you a respite of peace. Or it's the opposite. A religious upbringing that’s left you with unanswered questions. 

Spirituality is the concrete world revealing something that feels mystical. And, on occasion, that mystical realm reaches back.

In that vein, Frontier Poetry is excited to announce the 2026 Devotion & Divination Prize. For this contest we’re inviting poets to explore their relationship to spirituality and the supernatural. 

Send us your poems about God(s), ghosts, conjurings, and prophecy. We want to read your poems rooted in traditional religious practice, personal ritual, inherited belief, or the complete absence of belief. This contest welcomes mystery and the innumerable ways we seek to embrace, understand, or withstand the unknown. 

Guest Judge Hala Alyan will select the winners. The first-place winner will receive $3,000 and publication. 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.

Submissions open October 12 and close December 13, 2026.

There are no boundaries around what spirituality can look like. Poets of all spiritual backgrounds—and those whose relationships to belief are complicated, evolving, or uncertain—are warmly encouraged to submit.

Further reading for inspiration can be found here: 

• God-Country by Tina Chang | The Poetry Foundation
• First Offering by Adedayo Adeyemi Agarau | African Poetry Book Fund 
• Interactive :: House Saints by Hala Alyan | The Poetry Foundation
• Ode to My Aunt's Last Words / In Front of Me is Death and I Can't Help But Disassociate by Chandanie Somwaru | Hey Zine 

About the Guest Judge: 

Hala Alyan is the author of the novels Salt Houses—winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize—and The Arsonists’ City, a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Her debut memoir, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of five highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Twenty-Ninth Year and The Moon That Turns You Back. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.

What Alyan Is Looking For:

I’m looking for a poem that startles me into a kind of awakeness, something alive on the page. I’m drawn to surprising, precise imagery and uses of language that feel unusual. I also listen for cadence: a poem should have an energy and musicality that reveals itself when read aloud.

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.
• For this contest, we have no aesthetic or formal requirements and will consider all styles of poetry.
• Please submit unpublished poems only. Previously published work will be automatically disqualified.
• You may submit multiple times, but each submission requires a separate $20 fee.
• We welcome simultaneous submissions, but please notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
• 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 at the beginning of the contest. Please note the portal will close when we hit our cap of fifty submissions; there will be no additional waivers granted.
• 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. Some code-switching/meshing is warmly welcomed.
• Please include a brief cover letter that includes a short, third-person bio with your publication history, if applicable. To safeguard our staff, please include any necessary content warnings as well.
• Do not include any identifying information in the body of your document.
• Work generated by AI will be automatically disqualified.
• Please do not submit work if you have a close relationship with Frontier’s editors or the guest judge.
• Winners and finalists will be announced in the winter of 2027.

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.

Additional Feedback Options

The single–letter editorial feedback costs $59 and will provide you with two pages of detailed and actionable feedback by one of our editors on a single 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. Please allow eight to twelve weeks from the close of the contest to receive your editorial feedback.

Frontier Poetry Lab // Fall 2026

October 1 to October 31, 2026

Fall is creeping back into the calendar. The days are getting shorter, the trees are starting to change after a record-setting summer, and pumpkin spice has made its annual return. At the same time, work has a way of getting louder this time of year: bigger projects, looming deadlines, and the occasional text from your child’s diving coach that somehow requires an immediate response.

Writing can be one of the first things to get pushed aside when everything else gets busy. At Frontier Poetry, we want to give you a reason—and a structure—for keeping it in the mix.

In that vein, we’re thrilled to invite you to join the 2026 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, 2026.

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.

This year, we’re also introducing a new resource for participants: our first-ever forms packet. The packet explores ten classic and experimental poetic forms, offering background on each form alongside definitions, annotated examples, and writing prompts. Whether you already have a relationship with form or tend to avoid it altogether, the packet is meant to give you new ways to approach your writing—and encourage you towards experimentation. 

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: Explaining a Dress: Transfeminine Erasure and Vindication by Jessie Keary (selected by Nancy Miller Gomez), Good Listener by Kathryn Hargett-Hsu (selected by Kemi Alabi), 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 2026 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 in Creative Writing from the University of Tennessee and were the recipient of a 2022 Pushcart Prize. They have published three chapbooks, most recently Butt Stuff Flower Bush with Porkbelly Press. He co-founded and edits Underblong. Recent poems can be found in the American Poetry Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Shenandoah, among others. They can be found in the cheese aisle of most stores, in the middle of a hug, or editing poems at your local coffee shop.

Nikki Wallschlaeger is the author of four books of poetry as well as a number of chapbooks and an artist book. Her latest books are Waterbaby (Copper Canyon Press, 2021) and Hold Your Own (Copper Canyon Press, 2024). She was a Visiting Professor at the Iowa Writers Workshop in 2022. She lives in the Driftless region of southwest Wisconsin, the country she calls her home. 

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 “2026 Fall Lab Scholarship Request” as your subject. 
• 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 “2026 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.