2024 Annual Poetry Contest

Our Contest Is Open Until April 15th

$500 First Prize

$200 Second Prize

$100 Third Prize

We are delighted to announce that Rebecca Hart Olander will be judging our 2024 Poetry Contest.

Rebecca Hart Olander’s poetry and collaborative visual and written work has appeared in print, online, and in multiple anthologies. Her books include Dressing the Wounds (dgp, 2019) and Uncertain Acrobats (CavanKerry Press, 2021), named a Must-Read selection by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Rebecca has taught at Amherst and Smith colleges, Westfield State University, and through Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop, and she works with poets in the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing. She is the editor/director of Perugia Press.

Her first post-grad poem publication appeared in Common Ground Review, and she is honored to return to those roots as a judge for this year’s contest.

Poems from our 2023 contest (judged by Oliver de la Paz) are still up in our Spring/Summer 2023 issue:

First Place "Tree Streets" by Josh Jacobs

Second Place "You're from Nowhere" by Abby E. Murray

Third Place "In Case I Ever End Up on a True Crime Podcast" by Kelli Lage

Honorable Mention "Overhearing your native tongue in a foreign land" by Joseph Scalice

There is a $15 fee

Submissions Guidelines

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

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

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.

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. If you intend to submit work simultaneously, it would be kind of you to tell us so in your cover letter. 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. 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.

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

To submit work electronically, including contest entries: