Welcome home, poet.
Frontier Poetry began with the simple mission of being a platform for emerging poets—to uplift, to prepare, and to inspire.
We are looking for poets and poems that strive to place themselves at the edge of what language can do. This does not mean we are only concerned with experimental poetry. We believe sonnets can be at the frontier, book-length poems can be at the frontier, confessional poetry can be at the frontier—as long as a piece is constructed with exceptional consideration for language, craft, and heart, that poem is a fit for us.
Work by new and underrepresented voices is one of our priorities in publication. We take our role as a mediating platform between poet and world seriously and strive to use this role as fairly and justly as we can. The frontier land of poetry, that distant landscape where all voices can be heard clearly and in abundance, where poets from all contexts feel empowered to step into their writing—we seek that place, and hope to plant ourselves in its beauty.
By submitting to Frontier Poetry, submitters agree to receive correspondence about new work and submission opportunities from Frontier Poetry. You can unsubscribe at any time.
**If you haven't already, please verify your email address with Submittable for more consistent communication.**
Frontier Poetry does not consider or review AI-generated work. Submissions utilizing AI tools will be automatically declined.
The 2025 Epistolary Challenge
"Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were."
—Marcel Proust
Nostalgia is often bittersweet—a cocktail of revisionist memory, faded details, and present-day yearning. Remembering is an imperfect art of patchwork. As writers we are often drawn to the emotional resonances of the past over sequential facts. What we recall is what has shaped and rewired us. We may yearn for the past as it was, but more often, we’re drawn to the thread of feeling that runs through it.
In that spirit, Frontier Poetry is thrilled to announce the 2025 Epistolary Challenge.
For this ten-day challenge, Frontier seeks poetry written as letters to people, places, objects, and even moments in time. We want to read your letters to the things that stir your nostalgia. The echoes. The aftershocks. The remembered, and the reimagined. True to the spirit of Frontier, we encourage risk-taking: experiment, innovate, break the rules.
Explore examples of epistolary poems below:
- a letter to charlie parker by Dior J. Stephens | Academy of American Poets
- Dear Sister Agnes, by Jacques J. Rancourt | The Poetry Foundation
- Rewind by Anastasia Taylor-Lind | The Poetry Foundation
- To a Magazine by Mary Ruefle | Academy of American Poets
- On the Persistence of the Letter as a Form by Paul Guest | Academy of American Poets
- A Letter to the Girl I Used to Be by Ethan Smith | Button Poetry
Guidelines:
- The challenge will open on September 18, 2025, and close on September 28, 2025.
- Three winners will be chosen by our editorial staff. The first-place winner will receive $500, with the second- and third-place winners receiving $200 and $100, respectively. All winners will be published on Frontier’s website.
- For this challenge, submissions are open to new and emerging poets with no more than one full-length work of poetry published or forthcoming at the time of submission.
- Do not include any identifying information in the body of your document.
- Send up to three poems per submission. Simply, all three poems must be epistolary poems.
- Please submit previously 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 (of up to three epistolary poems) requires a separate $20 fee.
- Please provide a brief cover letter that includes a short, third-person bio with your publication history, as well as any applicable content warnings to safeguard our reading staff.
- Submissions are open internationally, to any poet writing primarily in English. Code-switching/meshing is warmly welcomed.
- If you haven’t already, please verify your email address with Submittable for more consistent communication.
- We will not accept AI-generated or -assisted work for this challenge. Such work will be automatically disqualified.
- 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 one poem in 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 note, the time frame for editorial letters is eight to twelve weeks from the close of the challenge.
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.