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Poets & Writers Magazine associate editor India Lena González hosts this virtual reading celebrating the ten debut poets featured in “The Beauty of Being: Our Eighteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February issue. The two-part event includes readings from the poets and conversation about their debut books, their influences and inspirations, and their individual paths to publication.
If you had the chance to send a poem into space, what would you say? Last week, the Library of Congress announced a collaboration with NASA to send a poem written by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón into space. The poem will be dedicated to NASA’s Europa Clipper mission and engraved on the spacecraft which will travel 1.8 billion miles to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa to gather detailed measurements and determine if the moon has conditions suitable for life. In honor of this momentous occasion, write a poem dedicated to a celestial body of your choice. Explore the galactic neighborhood with NASA’s interactive map of our solar system.
“I think the hardest part was finding an ending, specifically working against my own desire for neat resolution.” —Maggie Millner, author of Couplets
The author of What Can I Tell You?: Selected Poems examines poetic approaches to narrative.
Give your writing a little love the day after Valentine’s Day, and submit to contests with a February 15 deadline. Prizes include $3,000 for a first or second poetry collection or a work that intersects with poetry, including hybrid text, speculative prose, and translation; $1,500 for a group of poems; and $2,000 for a work of fiction. All awards have a cash prize of $1,000 or more, and four have no entry fee. Good luck, writers!
Academy of American Poets
Ambroggio Prize
A prize of $1,000 and publication by University of Arizona Press is given annually for a poetry collection originally written in Spanish by a living writer and translated into English. Achy Obejas will judge. Entry fee: none.
Academy of American Poets
Harold Morton Landon Translation Award
A prize of $1,000 is given annually for a poetry collection translated from any language into English and published in the United States during the previous year. Anna Deeny Morales will judge. Entry fee: none.
Airlie Press
Airlie Prize
A prize of $1,000 and publication by Airlie Press is given annually for a poetry collection. The editors will judge. Entry fee: $25.
Arrowsmith Press
Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry
A prize of $1,000 is given annually for a poetry collection published in English during the previous year by a writer who is not a citizen of the United States. Poets who are living in the United States as green card holders are among those eligible. Poets whose work appears in translation into English are also eligible. Canisia Lubrin will judge. Entry fee: $20.
Center for African American Poetry and Poetics/Autumn House Press
Book Prize
A prize of $3,000 and publication by Autumn House Press is given annually for a first or second poetry collection or a work that intersects with poetry, including hybrid text, speculative prose, and translation, by a writer of African descent. Nicole Sealey will judge. Entry fee: none.
Furious Flower Poetry Center
Furious Flower Poetry Prize
A prize of $1,500 and publication in Obsidian, the literary journal of Illinois State University, is given annually for a group of poems. The winner also receives a $500 honorarium to give a reading at James Madison University (either virtually or in person, as public health guidelines allow). Poets who have published no more than one collection of poetry are eligible. Evie Shockley will judge. Entry fee: $15.
New American Press
New American Poetry Prize
A prize of $1,500, publication by New American Press, and 25 author copies is given annually for a poetry collection. Jamaica Baldwin will judge. Writers of any citizenship working anywhere in the world are eligible, though the work should presume English-language readers. Entry fee: $25.
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. Entry fee: $29.
Syracuse University Press
Veterans Writing Award
A prize of $1,000 and publication by Syracuse University Press is given biennially in alternating years for either a debut fiction or a debut nonfiction manuscript written 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. The 2023 award will be given in nonfiction. Anuradha Bhagwati will judge. 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, creative nonfiction, and translation.
“It seems to me that prose, it may be lyrical, but it isn’t meant to be sung.” In this 2014 Academy of American Poets event, Edward Hirsch discusses the history and practice of poets writing prose with Toi Derricotte and Claudia Rankine.
“I never felt that I wrote [my poems] anyway. I would feel them coming from way off, and then they would come toward me and if I didn’t catch them, they went through me and went on. So I just figured they were part of the universe and not me.” In this excerpt from the 2017 film In Person: World Poets, a collaboration between Bloodaxe Books and filmmaker Pamela Robertson-Pearce, the late poet Ruth Stone reads her poems from her home in Vermont.
In Rachel Mannheimer’s debut book, Earth Room (Changes Press, 2022), the book-length narrative takes the reader to places such as Los Angeles, Berlin, the Hudson Valley, and Mars. Some of the settings are used in a straightforward and narrative way, but others act as a sort of emotional backdrop against which intimate relationships and observations on sculpture, performance art, and land art can be examined. Inspired by Mannheimer’s original use of place, write a poem titled after a city. Try to challenge yourself by exploring the emotional and psychological undertones you associate with that place.
“The best things that happen in poems are discoveries, they’re accidents; what comes out of our imagination, out of our deepest self, out of our memory.” In this 2007 PBS NewsHour interview, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Charles Simic speaks about his childhood in Yugoslavia, writing about war, becoming a U.S. poet laureate, and the freedom in poetry. Simic died at the age of eighty-four on January 9, 2023.
The author of What Can I Tell You?: Selected Poems explores the poetic potential of vernacular language.
