2024 Portrait Prize // Free for Historically Marginalized Poets

Maybe you’ve seen her. We don’t know her real name—we just know her as “The Mona Lisa.” How often do we really think about the “Girl with a Pearl Earring” outside of the confines of Vermeer’s iconic painting? Choose your favorite portrait, from photographs and paintings to that excellent selfie you took on vacation four and a half years ago—and think: how do all of these images express the emotion and history shared between artist and subject? 

Frontier Poetry wants your portrait poems—not just your portraits, but portraits of everyone who matters to you, from your beloved pets to your best friend from high school who you don’t talk to anymore, avoiding eye contact when you pass in the aisles at the grocery store. Of course, we want to see your self-portraits, but we also want to see how you depict your loved ones (and maybe even your enemies). Show us the joy, and show us the pain. The candid shots you took with your Polaroid camera, the yearbook photos, your older brother’s expired driver’s license you used as a fake ID in college that sorta, kinda, looked like you. Memory, urgency, history, narrative, specificity. We want to know The Mona Lisa’s name—we want to know everything about her. Put it all in the poems. Get it on the page.  

Chen Chen’s “Self-Portrait as So Much Potential,” is an excellent example of the way that the self-portrait form can be used to explore the different aspects of the self. Chen puts himself in context with his mother’s expectations, and when he describes himself, he sees his true self, rather than the projection of his mother’s aspiration.  

I am not the heterosexual neat freak my mother raised me to be. 

I am a gay sipper, & my mother has placed what’s left of her hope on my brothers.

 Chen’s realization of his mother’s disappointment might be hard to admit, but he uses humor in order to create this self portrait, and this allows him to be honest with himself. This balance of dark and light is where many portrait poems find success. A good portrait depicts its subject as truthfully as possible. If you are struggling to find inspiration, this poem by Diane Seuss, this poem by Eduardo C. Corral, or this poem by Danez Smith can all work as model texts. You can find some exercises to help you get started here. 

For this contest we will be awarding our first-place winner $3,500 and our second- and third-place winners $300 and $200, respectively. Our guest judge for this contest is Omotara James. The contest will be open from October 15 to December 15, 2024, and the winners will be selected and published in early to mid-spring of 2025. 

About Our Judge

Omotara James is the author of the debut poetry collection, Song of My Softening (Alice James Books, 2024), featured by NPR’s Morning Edition and The Washington Post’s Book Club. Her chapbook, Daughter Tongue, was selected by the African Poetry Book Fund for inclusion in the 2018 edition of New Generation African Poets. James is the recipient of the 2023 J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, as well as a 2019 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize. Her work has received support from the New York Foundation of the Arts, Cave Canem Foundation, Lambda Literary, and elsewhere. Widely anthologized, her poetry appears in the most recent Best American Poetry series. Critically acclaimed poet and bestselling author Idra Novey, hails James as “one of the defining poets of her generation.” Omotara James writes, teaches, and edits in New York City.

Guidelines: 

• Submissions are open to new and emerging writers (that is, for this contest, poets with no more than one full-length published work forthcoming at the time of submission).
• 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 immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
• We ask for no more than three poems with a max of 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.
• 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 15, 2024. We plan to announce winners and finalists in spring of 2025.