The 2023 Frontier OPEN — Winner and Finalists!

By Frontier Poetry | November 27, 2023

Congratulations to the winners of Frontier Poetry’s 2023 OPEN and an enormous thanks to everyone who submitted. Thank you, also, for your patience while we reviewed all the extraordinary work. A BIG round of applause to MaKshya Tolbert, the winner of our $5000 prize. MaKshya Tolbert’s poem will be published today, on November 27th, and the Finalists over the following few weeks.

WINNER

“Autobiography of not a horse” by MaKshya Tolbert

MaKshya Tolbert (she/they) just found their way back to Virginia. MaKshya serves on the Charlottesville Tree Commission and is a 2022-23 Lead to Life Curatorial Fellow and New City Arts Spring Artist-in-Residence. Their recent poems and essays have been published in Interim Journal, Emergence Magazine, Queer Poem-a-Day, RHINO, and the 2023 Best of the Net Anthology. In their free time, they are elsewhere— where Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. calls, ‘that physical or metaphorical place that affords the space to breathe.’

Finalists

To Be Published throughout December

“Pecola Breedlove Watches Zora Tether in Jordan Peele’s US then Nina Simone Sings in the Background”
by Yolanda J. Franklin

“Today, while reading the definition of OCD”
by Zachariah Claypole White

“The Ballad of Aisle Three”
by Amy Wolstenholme

“Halved Sonnets: A Diagram of Distances”
by Georgio Russell

“Hex as Language of The Unheard”
by Chace Zachery Morris

“The Seamstress”
by Sara Elkamel

Longlist