Read below for submission details for Frontier Poetry’s upcoming 2024 Portrait Prize! Submissions close December 15, 2024, and the winners will be selected and published in early to mid-spring of 2025.
(The information below has been copied from Frontier Poetry’s information page.)
Maybe you’ve seen her. We don’t know her real name—we just know her as “The Mona Lisa.” How often do we really think about the “Girl with a Pearl Earring” outside of the confines of Vermeer’s iconic painting? Choose your favorite portrait, from photographs and paintings to that excellent selfie you took on vacation four and a half years ago—and think: how do all of these images express the emotion and history shared between artist and subject?
Frontier Poetry wants your portrait poems—not just your portraits, but portraits of everyone who matters to you, from your beloved pets to your best friend from high school who you don’t talk to anymore, avoiding eye contact when you pass in the aisles at the grocery store. Of course, we want to see your self-portraits, but we also want to see how you depict your loved ones (and maybe even your enemies). Show us the joy, and show us the pain. The candid shots you took with your Polaroid camera, the yearbook photos, your older brother’s expired driver’s license you used as a fake ID in college that sorta, kinda, looked like you. Memory, urgency, history, narrative, specificity. We want to know The Mona Lisa’s name—we want to know everything about her. Put it all in the poems. Get it on the page.
For this contest we will be awarding our first-place winner $3,000 and our second- and third-place winners $300 and $200, respectively. Our guest judge for this contest is Omotara James.
There is a $20.00 submission fee for this contest.
Guidelines:
- Submissions are open to new and emerging writers (that is, for this contest, poets with no more than one full-length published work forthcoming at the time of submission).
- Send us only your best, polished work—unpublished poems only, please.
- As part of our dedication to the pursuit of a more inclusive publishing world, we are offering a free submission window for poets from historically marginalized groups at the beginning of the contest until we reach our cap of fifty. Please note the free portal will close when we hit our submission cap.
- Please do not include any identifying information in the body of your document.
- We accept simultaneous submissions, but please notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
- We ask for no more than three poems with a max of five pages per submission. Please submit all your poems in ONE document. We have no particular aesthetic or formal requirements and consider all styles of poetry.
- Each entry requires a submission fee of $20.
- Multiple submissions (of up to three poems apiece) are allowed, but each requires a separate entry fee.
- Please include a brief cover letter with your publication history and personal bio. Also include any content warnings in consideration of our reading staff.
- Work generated by AI will be automatically disqualified.
- Submissions are open internationally, to any poet writing primarily in English. Some code-switching/meshing is very welcome.
- Please do not submit work if you have a close relationship with the guest judge.
- If you have any questions, please visit our FAQ page. If you don’t find the answer to your question, email us: contact (at ) frontierpoetry (dot) com.
- We do not hold preference for any particular style or topic—we simply seek the best poems we can find. Send us work that is blister, that is color, that strikes hot the urge to live and be. For a sense of what we are looking for, read through our previously published poems or What We Look For. We warmly and sincerely invite all voices, and especially those that have been historically marginalized and silenced to submit work.
- We also encourage you to submit your poetry for free to our New Voices, open year-round. We pay our emerging NV poets $50 per poem, published every Friday. New Voices is the beating heart of Frontier, and we hope to read your work soon. Thank you so much for supporting the community of new and emerging poets.
Submit your work here: https://frontier.submittable.com/submit