The 2024 Frontier OPEN Prize Winners & Finalists!
The moment you’ve all been waiting for: we’re announcing the winners and finalists for the 2024 Frontier OPEN.
We’re excited to welcome Marianne Kunkel into the Frontier community with her winning poem, “To the Man who Hugged Me after I Rear-ended Him.” Selected by our editors, Marianne has won publication and $5,000. Her poem was most impressive to the editors because of the way it so clearly represented the moments of human kindness that appear when we least expect them. Her poem brought our readers out of their busy lives and into a suddenly compassionate and human space. The poem is a breath of fresh air in our scheduled and speedy lives, and we at Frontier hope that it inspires readers to slow down for a moment and appreciate these random moments of kindness, as they can be few and far between—but they do exist, and through poetry, we can discover and cherish them.
Below, we are also excited to list our nine finalists, whose poems will be published every Wednesday in November. Keep an eye out for more poems from these amazing writers, who are showing us all kinds of forms, focuses, and techniques—it’s an honor to share this excellent work our readers and support writers from all kinds of schools of thought and practice.
Thank you to all who submitted, it was a pleasure to consider your work.
WINNER
Marianne Kunkel
“To the Man who Hugged Me after I Rear-ended Him”
Marianne Kunkel is the author of Hillary, Made Up (Stephen F. Austin State University Press) and The Laughing Game (Finishing Line Press), two anthologies, and poems that have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Missouri Review, The Notre Dame Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor of English at Johnson County Community College. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she was the managing editor of Prairie Schooner and the African Poetry Book Fund. She is the co-editor-in-chief of Kansas City Review. She loves writing poems and baking pies, and she posts images of both on Instagram at @asliceofpoetry.
Finalists
Nicole Santalucia, “A Last Look at Merwin, Stevens, and Williams”
Kate DeLay, “Baby Talk”
Sighle Meehan, “half-doors, bolted and broken”
Imani Cezanne, ” I found this poem in Elva’s kitchen”
Robin Wang, “water memory”
Tija Tippett, “Dekopon”
Chennelle Channer, “Talkin with my hands, these ain’t gang signs”
Lee Ann Pelletier, “I wanna write a poem where Plato fights Zarathustra”
Justin Rigamonti, “Failure”
Honorable Mention: Steven Churchill, “Prototype”
We look forward to publishing our nine finalists throughout November. They will appear on Wednesdays, so mark your calendars for more celebration as these impressive poems are shared throughout the month. These nine poems are all different, taking new and innovative angles to describe universal human experiences—and through the varying perspectives, we see nine different ways to approach poetry, but also nine different ways to consider how to be an artist, a creative person, a thinker, an observer, and a human being. Each finalist is awarded $100 for their efforts but the real prize is that we get to engage with their words and we are so glad to welcome them into our community. We hope you enjoy these poems as much as we did.
Our long list honors another group of excellent poets, selected by our group of editors who just did not want to let these poems go. As with the finalists, each poet here has a powerful voice and we are so glad to share them with you—in no particular order!
The Longlist
Jonathan Patrick
Julia Liu
Bukola Badejo
Rory Dreyfus
Haley Thomas
Indrani Perera
Kerri Davis
Elezanbee Vue
Lisa Majaj’
Folasade Adesanya
Kyle Okeke
Miguel Eichelberger
Lynne Schimdt
Majda Gama
Kate Marshall Flaherty
Magdalena Arias Vasquez
James Reeder
Ava Camargo
Veronique Beguin
Ela K
Will Hemmer
Holly Zhou
Mark Minton
