2025 Hurt & Healing Prize
Open for Submissions!
January 1, 2025, to March 2, 2025
Healing begins when someone bears witness.
I saw you. I believe you.
As poets, we begin our journey by bearing witness. Poetry is the language of observation and we often see signs and symbols in the world that others overlook. But we can’t always stay on the sidelines—sometimes life throws us into the world before we’re ready, which can lead to undue harm. We all feel pain, but the question then becomes: What can we do with it?
The quote above is from Olivia Benson, protagonist of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, played by Mariska Hargitay. The link between this television show and our poetry contest might not be obvious, but Hargitay not only bears witness in her twenty-five year run as Detective Olivia Benson, she commits to protect the most vulnerable among us and fosters a space for healing as well. Her dedication is admirable, and we at Frontier are making the same promise. Let’s not forget that the word “poem” comes from the Greek word for “create.” It’s not just about seeing or believing, it’s about what you make from what you’ve seen and what you’ve learned.
This year’s Hurt & Healing Prize is about expressing our pain, but it’s also about celebrating all we have overcome. It is also a call to action—an invitation to support each other in the darkest times. We may feel as if the path forward isn’t clear—but as a community, we answer these questions together.
Further reading for inspiration can be found here:
“Am I Going to Kill My Daughter” | The Poetry Foundation
“Grief” | The Poetry Foundation
The first place winner will receive $3,000 and publication. Second- and third-place winners will receive $300 and $200 respectively, as well as publication.
About Our Judge:
Robert Wood Lynn is a poet from Virginia. He is the author of the collection Mothman Apologia (Yale University Press, 2022) and the chapbook How to Maintain Eye Contact (Button Poetry, 2023). He is the recipient of the 2021 Yale Younger Poets Prize, the 2023 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and a 2023 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship. His work has been featured in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, POETRY, The Yale Review, and other publications. He teaches poetry at Juilliard and Brooklyn Poets.
What our judge is looking for:
I am honored to be asked to jury Frontier’s poetry contest themed on hurt and healing, because so much of the work of poetry happens in this space of change—hurt and healing not simply or even necessarily as subject but as experience, since that is what a poem is: an experience rather than a recounting. I am interested in poems that wound us gently, or that restore something inside us, or both. Poems that help us reach the interior and emotional spaces no other medium could. That let language work indirectly, through image, metaphor, surprise, and play, to accomplish things impossible in straightforward retelling.
Guidelines:
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Submissions are open to new and emerging writers (for this contest, we define this as poets with no more than one full-length published work forthcoming at the time of submission).
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Send up to three poems per submission, for a total of no more than five pages. We have no aesthetic or formal requirements and consider all styles of poetry. Each new submission requires a $20 reading fee.
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As part of our dedication to the pursuit of a more inclusive publishing world, we offer a free submission window for poets from historically marginalized groups (BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, disabled community, et cetera) at the beginning of the contest until our cap of fifty. Please note the portal will close when we hit our cap.
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Do not include any identifying information in the body of your document.
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Please submit unpublished poems only.
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We welcome simultaneous submissions, but please notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
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You may submit multiple times, but each submission requires a separate $20 fee.
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Please provide a brief cover letter that includes a short, third-person bio with your publication history and any applicable content warnings.
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Submissions are open internationally, to any poet writing in English. Inclusion of other languages is welcome, as long as the poem is primarily written in English.
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Please do not submit work if you have a personal relationship with the judge.
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If you haven’t already, please verify your email address with Submittable for more consistent communication.
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We will not accept AI-generated work for this contest.
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If you have any questions, please visit our FAQ page first. If you don’t find the answer to your question, you can send an email to contact (at) frontierpoetry (dot) com.
Editorial Feedback Option:
This option costs $59 and will provide you with two pages of detailed and actionable feedback on one poem in your submission, including suggestions for future submissions. The $149 option will provide you with three letters from three different editors. Our guest editors are paid a significant portion of the fee and all are astute and professional poets. Please note, the time frame for editorial letters is 8–12 weeks from the close of the contest.
Note on What We Look For
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.
