2026 Contest Winners!

April 15, 2026

$500 First Prize

$200 Second Prize

$100 Third Prize

We are thrilled to announce the winners of our 2026 Annual Poetry Contest, judged by Lisa Hase-Jackson.

Winners will be published in our Spring/Summer issue coming out in mid-June. Thank you to all who entered!

CGR 2026 Contest Winners

First prize ($500): Jed Myers, “Railbed Letter”

A haunting lyric bringing to mind long journeys, migration, history, unhoused peoples, and the interstices of rural and urban settings.

Second prize ($200): Dawn McGuire, “How Forever Works”

A convincing narrative of an elementary school classroom. I immediately resonated with both the speaker and the students. Very apt similes and metaphors as well.

Third prize ($100): Jonathan Chibuike Ukah, “My Sister's Eyelashes”

For its vivid imagery and surprising juxtapositions.

Honorable Mention: Deborah Doolittle, “Eponymous”

For its clever use of language and surprising imagery.

Again, our sincere thanks to all those who entered, and to Lisa Hase-Jackson for judging.

Lisa Hase-Jackson, our 2026 Annual Poetry Contest Judge.

Lisa Hase-Jackson’s second collection of poetry, Insomnia in Another Town (Clemson University Press 2024), was selected by poet Clare Batemen for the 2024 Converse University MFA Alumni Book Prize and was awarded the 2024 Nelson Poetry Book Prize by the Kansas Authors Club. Her debut collection of poetry, Flint and Fire (Word Works) was selected by Pulitzer prize-winning poet Jericho Brown for the 2019 Hilary Tham Capital Collection Series. She has been awarded writing residency fellowships from Vermont Studio Center and the Kimmel Harding-Nelson Center for the Arts. Her work has recently appeared in the anthologies The Crafty Poet and Ice on a Hot Stove as well as in such literary journals as The Cimarron Review, Sugar House Review, Vox Populi, and Verse Daily.

$15.00

Submissions Guidelines

We welcome regular submissions from September 1st to May 1st, and contest submissions from January to mid-March.

For regular submissions, send us three to five poems in a single document, please! They should be your own original work.

For contest submissions, three is the maximum.

We look for well-crafted poems under 61 lines. Poems should be single-spaced indicating stanza breaks.

We are also looking for creative non-fiction and short stories. Just send us a submission that is no longer than 12 pages (so you could send a single story or a small group of flash fiction pieces), double-spaced, and NOT in a PDF.

Please do not send us AI-generated material.

We accept work via Submittable. Please include a short bio (50 words or so).

We will not be able to read Snail-mail manuscripts, so please do not send us any.

We are happy to accept simultaneous submissions, but we do not accept previously published work. Once we have notified you of an acceptance, it will be published as a first time publication. All rights revert back to you, the author, after publication.

We read all submissions, but that process takes time and we are overworked. This is one reason we encourage simultaneous submissions–if your work is snapped up elsewhere by a more efficient magazine, we will be thrilled for you. Just let us know as soon as you know.

We close submissions from May 2 to August 31st in order to catch up on reading. We apologize for any delays. 2020-2021 almost crushed us, and Fall 2023 brought some personal losses. but we're doing better now, with wonderful readers and interns.

If you have questions, please contact us! (That is NOT the address to send poems to, however.)

To submit work electronically, including contest entries: