The 2026 Debut Chapbook Prize 

March 9th, 2026, to May 10th, 2026

“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” — Franz Kafka

According to Flannery O’Connor, writing is an act of discovery—an unveiling of what remains unresolved, what has yet to be turned over. Victor Hugo once said there is a world trapped in each writer. Larger collections curate the memories, people, passions, and images that return to our writing again and again. Frontier Poetry is ready to invite your poetry—something not bent, not watered down. With this contest, we seek writing that honors your most merciless obsessions: your chapbook.

Frontier Poetry is excited to announce the Debut Chapbook Prize returns this spring! From March 9th through May 10th, 2026, the Frontier editorial team seeks poetry collections of no more than thirty pages that center a clearly envisioned and executed theme, motif, and/or throughline. We’re looking for your untold stories—chapbooks that break the rules in service of your work and voice. We warmly invite submissions from writers of all backgrounds.

Guest judge Patricia Smith will select one winner, who will receive a $2,000 prize and publication, earning 50% royalties, and twenty-five copies for the author to share and sell. The chapbook will be published by Discover New Art’s in-house publisher, Red Mare Press, with distribution through Bookshop.org, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. Thousands of readers, editors, and magazines will also receive access to the chapbook through our newsletter. Our goal is to offer a catalytic stepping stone to help launch your poetic career.

The contest opens March 9th, 2026, and closes May 10th, 2026.

About Our Judge:

Patricia Smith is an inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and a winner of the National Book Award for Poetry. She is the author of nine acclaimed books of poetry, including Unshuttered; Incendiary Art, finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the 2018 NAACP Image Award;Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; andBlood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and most recently,The Intentions of Thunder, the winner of the 2025 National Book Award for poetry. A Guggenheim Fellow, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, Smith is a creative writing professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and a former distinguished professor at the City University of New York. She lives in New Jersey with her husband.

What Our Judge is Looking For:

"I can't make room for ordinary. There's no room for crank-it-out, good-enough, put-the-good-stuff-up-front. I imagine a vibing wire running through the work, one that jolts and energizes me with no sign of letting go. I know it sounds like I want the pages peppered with pom-poms and LED lights, but that's not the case. I want a sign that the poet is still mightily turned on by the possibilities of their own work, that it still has the power to surprise and occasionally rattle the rafters. I want beauty and disturbance and irresistible story. Make me see something in a way I've never seen it."

Guidelines for Submission:

• For this contest, we are specifically looking for poets with no prior chapbook, manuscript, or full-length collection of poetry published or forthcoming prior to this contest.
• Writers from historically marginalized groups are welcome to submit for a reduced fee until we reach our cap of fifty. No additional fee reductions will be granted.
• The manuscript should be fifteen to thirty pages of poems, not including front and back matter.
• The manuscript should be unpublished as a whole, although individual poems may be previously published.
• Do not include any identifying information in the manuscript itself or in the file name.
• Please put any acknowledgements in the cover letter field of Submittable and not in the manuscript.
• Submissions are open internationally, to any poet writing in English. Inclusion of other languages, such as in code-switching/meshing, is welcome, as long as the poem is primarily in English.
• Simultaneous submissions are welcome, but please notify us immediately if the chapbook is accepted elsewhere.
• Multiple submissions are allowed, but each manuscript must be submitted separately with the $25 reading fee.
• Work generated by AI will be automatically disqualified.
• Winners and finalists will be announced late summer of 2026.

Editorial Feedback Option:

Two options for feedback are available: Editorial Letter and Manuscript Consultation.

• For practical feedback on a single poem from the collection, choose Editorial Letter (one to two pages of developmental feedback on a single poem in the submitted collection).
• For an in-depth editorial service on the manuscript as a whole, choose Manuscript Consultation (ten to fifteen pages of feedback plus a phone or email consultation).

Our guest editors are paid a significant portion of the fee and are all astute, professional poets.

Testimonial for the Manuscript Consultation: “Meeting with a Frontier Poetry editor was well worth it. Poems need to be read out loud and to be heard by more than one person. And if that second listener is generous and curious and knows where to point to a better order and when a line needs torque or the junk pile, then there’s a chance for mere words, that mere air, to sound delicious.”

Frontier Poetry’s Chapbook Catalog:

You can read the winners of our previous chapbook contests here:

• Explaining a Dress by Jessie Keary (2024)
• Good Listener by Kathryn Hargett-Hsu (2023)
• Opportunity Cost by Abby Johnson (2021)
• In the Year of Our Making & Unmaking by Frederick Speers (2020)

Testimonial for the Chapbook Process: “Working with Frontier to bring my debut chapbook to life was an absolute dream! It was an ideal collaboration. I felt fully supported in their commitment to my vision. The talent of the exterior and interior designers of the chapbook really brought it all together. Emelie and Michaela listened to my input, but their own creativity made the final product even better than I could have imagined. I deeply appreciate the whole team’s attention to detail and overall thoughtfulness. They emphasized my own artistic agency and voice. I will always treasure working with Frontier and the beautiful chapbook that was produced. They totally captured the spirit of my work, and I am forever grateful!” 

— Jessie Keary 

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.

The 2026 Debut Chapbook Prize 

March 9, 2026 to May 10, 2026

Frontier Poetry is offering a reduced entry fee of $15 to any historically marginalized poets until we hit our cap of fifty. Please only use this submission form if you fit this category. 

“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” — Franz Kafka

According to Flannery O’Connor, writing is an act of discovery—an unveiling of what remains unresolved, what has yet to be turned over. Victor Hugo once said there is a world trapped in each writer. Larger collections curate the memories, people, passions, and images that return to our writing again and again. Frontier Poetry is ready to invite your poetry—something not bent, not watered down. With this contest, we seek writing that honors your most merciless obsessions: your chapbook.

Frontier Poetry is excited to announce the Debut Chapbook Prize returns this spring! From March 9th through May 10th, 2026, the Frontier editorial team seeks poetry collections of no more than thirty pages that center a clearly envisioned and executed theme, motif, and/or throughline. We’re looking for your untold stories—chapbooks that break the rules in service of your work and voice. We warmly invite submissions from writers of all backgrounds.

Guest judge Patricia Smith will select one winner, who will receive a $2,000 prize and publication, earning 50% royalties, and twenty-five copies for the author to share and sell. The chapbook will be published by Discover New Art’s in-house publisher, Red Mare Press, with distribution through Bookshop.org, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. Thousands of readers, editors, and magazines will also receive access to the chapbook through our newsletter. Our goal is to offer a catalytic stepping stone to help launch your poetic career.

The contest opens March 9th, 2026, and closes May 10th, 2026.

About Our Judge:

Patricia Smith is an inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and a winner of the National Book Award for Poetry. She is the author of nine acclaimed books of poetry, including Unshuttered; Incendiary Art, finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the 2018 NAACP Image Award;Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; andBlood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and most recently,The Intentions of Thunder,the winner of the 2025 National Book Award for poetry. A Guggenheim Fellow, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, Smith is a creative writing professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and a former distinguished professor at the City University of New York. She lives in New Jersey with her husband.

What Our Judge is Looking For:

"I can't make room for ordinary. There's no room for crank-it-out, good-enough, put-the-good-stuff-up-front. I imagine a vibing wire running through the work, one that jolts and energizes me with no sign of letting go. I know it sounds like I want the pages peppered with pom-poms and LED lights, but that's not the case. I want a sign that the poet is still mightily turned on by the possibilities of their own work, that it still has the power to surprise and occasionally rattle the rafters. I want beauty and disturbance and irresistible story. Make me see something in a way I've never seen it."

Guidelines for Submission:

• For this contest, we are specifically looking for poets with no prior chapbook, manuscript, or full-length collection of poetry published or forthcoming prior to this contest.
• Writers from historically marginalized groups are welcome to submit for a reduced fee until we reach our cap of fifty. No additional fee reductions will be granted.
• The manuscript should be fifteen to thirty pages of poems, not including front and back matter.
• The manuscript should be unpublished as a whole, although individual poems may be previously published.
• Do not include any identifying information in the manuscript itself or in the file name.
• Please put any acknowledgements in the cover letter field of Submittable and not in the manuscript.
• Submissions are open internationally, to any poet writing in English. Inclusion of other languages, such as in code-switching/meshing, is welcome, as long as the poem is primarily in English.
• Simultaneous submissions are welcome, but please notify us immediately if the chapbook is accepted elsewhere.
• Multiple submissions are allowed, but each manuscript must be submitted separately with the $25 reading fee.
• Work generated by AI will be automatically disqualified.
• Winners and finalists will be announced late summer of 2026.

Editorial Feedback Option:

Two options for feedback are available: Editorial Letter and Manuscript Consultation.

• For practical feedback on a single poem from the collection, choose Editorial Letter (one to two pages of developmental feedback on a single poem in the submitted collection).
• For an in-depth editorial service on the manuscript as a whole, choose Manuscript Consultation (ten to fifteen pages of feedback plus a phone or email consultation).

Our guest editors are paid a significant portion of the fee and are all astute, professional poets.

Testimonial for the Manuscript Consultation: “Meeting with a Frontier Poetry editor was well worth it. Poems need to be read out loud and to be heard by more than one person. And if that second listener is generous and curious and knows where to point to a better order and when a line needs torque or the junk pile, then there’s a chance for mere words, that mere air, to sound delicious.”

Frontier Poetry’s Chapbook Catalog:

You can read the winners of our previous chapbook contests here:

• Explaining a Dress by Jessie Keary (2024)
• Good Listener by Kathryn Hargett-Hsu (2023)
• Opportunity Cost by Abby Johnson (2021)
• In the Year of Our Making & Unmaking by Frederick Speers (2020)

Testimonial for the Chapbook Process: “Working with Frontier to bring my debut chapbook to life was an absolute dream! It was an ideal collaboration. I felt fully supported in their commitment to my vision. The talent of the exterior and interior designers of the chapbook really brought it all together. Emelie and Michaela listened to my input, but their own creativity made the final product even better than I could have imagined. I deeply appreciate the whole team’s attention to detail and overall thoughtfulness. They emphasized my own artistic agency and voice. I will always treasure working with Frontier and the beautiful chapbook that was produced. They totally captured the spirit of my work, and I am forever grateful!” 

— Jessie Keary 

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. 

Frontier Poetry Lab // Spring 2026

April 1 to April 30, 2026

The Frontier editorial team is so excited to step into the spring season with our readers and writers. We understand that as the weather warms, the number of distractions—trips with friends, days at the lake, park walks—can make it difficult to create a dedicated time to invest in your writing. At Frontier Poetry, we’re here to help! 

We’re thrilled to invite you to join the 2026 Spring 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 April 1 to April 30, 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.

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, 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 Spring 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 Spring Lab Scholarship Request” as your subject. 
• All Spring 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 Spring 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.