It is fitting that during the most romantic month of the year, contest opportunities abound for poets! With deadlines of either February 14 or February 15, these awards include opportunities for both English language poetry and poetry in translation. There are also two contests for prose writers. All offer a cash prize of $1,000 or more.

Academy of American Poets Ambroggio Prize: A prize of $1,000 and publication by University of Arizona Press is given annually for a book of poetry originally written in Spanish by a living writer and translated into English. The poet and translator will split the prize. Rigoberto González will judge. Deadline: February 15. Entry fee: none.

Academy of American Poets Harold Morton Landon Translation Award: A prize of $1,000 is given annually for a book of poetry translated from any language into English and published in the United States during the previous year. Indran Amirthanayagam will judge. Deadline: February 15. Entry fee: none.

Academy of American Poets Raiziss/De Palchi Fellowship: A fellowship of $25,000 is given biennially for the translation into English of a work of modern Italian poetry. Moira Egan, Rebecca Falkoff, and Graziella Sidoli will judge. Deadline: February 15. Entry fee: none.

Arrowsmith Press Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry: A prize of $1,000 will be given annually for a poetry collection published in English by a writer who is not a resident of the United States. The winner will also receive an invitation to read at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre in Boston; a one-week residency at poet Derek Walcott’s home in St. Lucia or in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, in conjunction with the annual Walcott Festival; and the publication of a limited-edition broadside of their work by Arrowsmith Press. Poets who are living in the United States as green card holders are eligible. Poets whose work appears in translation into English are also eligible. Major Jackson will judge. Deadline: February 15. Entry fee: $20.

Hippocrates Prizes for Poetry and Medicine: A prize of £1,000 (approximately $1,260) and publication in the Hippocrates Prize anthology and on the Hippocrates website is given annually for a single poem on a medical theme. A prize of £1,000 (approximately $1,260) and publication in the Hippocrates Prize anthology and on the website is also given for a single poem on a medical theme written by a health professional. Anne Barnard, Keki N. Daruwalla, Anna Jackson, and Neena Modi will judge. Deadline: February 14. Entry fee: $10 ($15 for postal submissions).

Milkweed Editions Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry: A prize of $10,000 and publication by Milkweed Editions is given annually for a poetry collection by a poet currently residing in Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, or Wisconsin. Deadline: February 15. Entry fee: none.

Sarabande Books Morton and McCarthy Prizes: Two prizes of $2,000 each and publication by Sarabande Books are given annually for collections of poetry and fiction. Victoria Chang will judge in poetry and Danielle Evans will judge in fiction. Deadline: February 15. Entry fee: $29.

Salem State University Claire Keyes Poetry Award: A prize of $1,000 and publication in Soundings East is given annually for a group of poems. Afaa Michael Weaver will judge. Deadline: February 15. Entry fee: $10 (or $15 to receive a copy of the magazine).

Syracuse University Press Veterans Writing Award: A prize of $1,000 and publication by Syracuse University Press is given biennially for a novel or short story collection by a U.S. veteran, active duty personnel in any branch of the U.S. military, or the immediate family member of a veteran or active duty personnel. Phil Klay will judge. Deadline: February 15. Entry fee: none.

Visit the contest websites for complete guidelines, and check out the Grants & Awards database and Submission Calendar for more contests in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction.

Hey mi gente, happy February. I’m happy to share with you more reflections from Houston writers about how they have been spending their time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Each writer has answered this simple question:

What have you been doing since the pandemic?

This week, we hear from Robin Davidson. Davidson is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Kneeling in the Dojo (Finishing Line Press, 2013) and City That Ripens on the Tree of the World (Calypso Editions, 2013), and the collection, Luminous Other, awarded the Ashland Poetry Press’s 2012 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize. Recipient of a Fulbright professorship at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland and an NEA translation fellowship, Davidson is cotranslator with Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska of Ewa Lipska’s poems from the Polish—The New Century (Northwestern University Press, 2009) and Dear Ms. Schubert (Princeton University Press, 2021). Davidson served as Houston poet laureate under the leadership of mayors Annise Parker and Sylvester Turner from 2015 to 2017, and edited the citywide 2018 anthology, Houston’s Favorite Poems. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2019, and teaches literature and creative writing as professor emeritus of English for the University of Houston-Downtown.

Here’s what she had to say:

“In the early hours of March 11, 2020, I woke to intense chills, fever, nausea, and the beginning of what would become three weeks of a flu-like illness more severe than I’d ever before experienced. I was bedridden for most of that time, with a persistent fever of 103 to 104, and for days Sappho’s line resonated in my thoughts, I feel that death has come near me. There was no COVID testing in Houston then, and my doctor believed I likely had contracted a flu, despite the vaccine I’d had weeks earlier. My husband, too, experienced some of these symptoms, though far milder, and we did not sleep in the same room for two weeks after forty-four years of sharing a bed nightly, except when one of us was traveling. We did not see any of our children or grandchildren for more than two months, and I thought I would die of grief in their absence, rather than of some unnameable disease. The morning I woke to the weight of an icy hand pressing down hard on my chest, I recognized the signs of pneumonia. I prayed, willed that hand away, and decided to get up and move, no matter if I stumbled, couldn’t entirely stand. In the weeks that followed I saw friends and family members lose loved ones to COVID, loved ones they could not sit with in their illness, nor bury upon their death. I tried to read, to write. Nothing worked, except for sorting through photographs of my grandsons which I’d print, cut out, and glue into a tiny scrapbook for each of them to have in our absence. My husband and I have recovered slowly over the course of ten months, with intermittent symptoms recurring like mild sequelae. We only learned for certain in late summer that we had had COVID when our antibodies tests showed positive results for SARS-CoV-2. As I’ve watched this virus sweep through our nation and the world, I recognize how minor my family’s experience has been compared to the great suffering of so many others. I wrote this piece initially on the eve of one of the most critical presidential elections in the history of the United States. As of that morning, November 2, 2020, the U.S. reported 9,282,358 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and 230,937 deaths. Since January, Americans have seen that death toll surpass 450,000. We have seen an insurrection play out in our nation’s Capitol Building in which violent extremists attempted a governmental coup. But we have also witnessed the successful election and inauguration of president Joseph Biden and vice president Kamala Harris as a powerful step on behalf of a renewed democracy. This nation has some distance to go in combatting the COVID pandemic, systemic racism and its concomitant violence, extreme climate, economic crisis, and global unrest, but the future looks far brighter this month than it has in the past four years. May we continue to choose well.”

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Submissions are open for four prizes administered by Lambda Literary, including the inaugural Randall Kenan Prize for Black LGBTQ Fiction. Founded in memory of author Randall Kenan, who died last year at age fifty-seven, the prize will award $3,000 to a Black LGBTQ writer, “whose fiction explores themes of Black LGBTQ life, culture, and/or history.” Meanwhile, this year’s Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists’ Prize will award two writers $5,000 each; the Jeanne Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction will award one writer $2,500; and the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging LGBTQ Writers will grant two writers $1,000 each.

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Using only the online submission system, submit to any of the four prizes by February 15. All applications require a cover letter, a curriculum vitae or résumé, and at least one writing sample. Each contest has different eligibility requirements; for example, writers submitting to the Randall Kenan Prize must have published at least one book of fiction. Visit the website for complete guidelines, including descriptions of the body of work required for eligibility for each prize. None of the contests require an entry fee.

Lambda Literary is a nonprofit that “nurtures and advocates for LGBTQ writers,” and is home to the Lambda Literary Awards, or “Lammys,” which honor the best LGBTQ books of the year. Lambda also runs a writer’s retreat and a program that brings queer and trans writers into schools to meet with young readers.