Frontier Poetry Lab // Fall 2024

October 1 to October 31, 2024 

Frontier Poetry is excited to invite you to our Fall 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 October 1, 2024, to October 31, 2024.

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.

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 Fall 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 in The Nation, The 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 in Narratively, The Rumpus, Brevity, and more. She's earned two MFAs, one in creative nonfiction, the other in poetry, both from University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. She’s authored a full-length poetry collection,Tangled by Blood (Moon Tide Press, 2023) and a second poetry book, Safe Handling (Moon Tide Press, 2024). She shares space with four Newfoundlands and her sons in a tiny Idaho town.

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the daughter of Mexican immigrants and author of Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites (Mouthfeel Press) and Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications). A former Steinbeck Fellow and Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner, she’s received residencies from Hedgebrook, Ragdale, Yefe Nof, Jentel, and National Parks Arts Foundation in partnership with Gettysburg National Military Park and Poetry Foundation. Her poem “Battlegrounds” was featured at Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, On Being’s Poetry Unbound, and the anthology, Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World (W. W. Norton). Her poetry and essays can be found at The Acentos Review, Huizache, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Offing, [PANK], Santa Fe Writers Project, and other journals. She teaches poetry and creative writing with Antioch University’s MFA and UCLA Extension, and is the director of Women Who Submit, a nonprofit organization empowering woman-identifying and nonbinary writers to submit work for literary publication. Inspired by her Chicana identity, she works to cultivate love and comfort in chaotic times.

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 “Fall Lab 2024 Scholarship Request” as your subject.
• All Fall 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 “Fall Lab 2024 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. 

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.
• 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 15, 2024. We plan to announce winners and finalists in spring of 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 twelve weeks after the contest closes to receive your feedback.