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.

Chen Chen’s “Self-Portrait as So Much Potential,” is an excellent example of the way that the self-portrait form can be used to explore the different aspects of the self. Chen puts himself in context with his mother’s expectations, and when he describes himself, he sees his true self, rather than the projection of his mother’s aspiration.

I am not the heterosexual neat freak my mother raised me to be.

I am a gay sipper, & my mother has placed what’s left of her hope on my brothers.

Chen’s realization of his mother’s disappointment might be hard to admit, but he uses humor in order to create this self portrait, and this allows him to be honest with himself. This balance of dark and light is where many portrait poems find success. A good portrait depicts its subject as truthfully as possible. If you are struggling to find inspiration, this poem by Diane Seuss, this poem by Eduardo C. Corral, or this poem by Danez Smith can all work as model texts. You can find some exercises to help you get started here.

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. The contest will be open from October 15 to December 15, 2024, and the winners will be selected and published in early to mid-spring of 2025.