2025 Misfit Poems Prize

There are all these rules—you use commas one way and everyone freaks out, but you use them another way and you just won the Pulitzer. It’s confusing. Sometimes you gotta wonder if they’re being confusing on purpose. If you feel strongly about something, why don’t you say so, instead of iambic pentameter, or whatever Kendrick Lamar did.

Poetry frees us from all of those constraints—and lets us throw out the rule book. Let’s face it, words are everywhere. They’re here to stay. Or: If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em—instead of resisting the rules, why not experiment with them, change them and mess with them in ways no one has before? For the 2025 Misfit Poems Prize, we want your rulebreakers.

Frontier wants your misfits, your experiments, your alphabet fridge poems and the scribbles on your kid’s brown bag lunch. We want to see the poems that, like us, didn’t fit in during high school. If you were hiding in the library and writing poetry, just like we were, all those times you were cutting gym class, now’s the time to show us what you’ve got, and we can’t wait to see!

The first place winner will receive $2,000 and publication. Second- and third-place winners will receive $300 and $200 respectively, as well as publication.

Marianne Chan grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, and Lansing, Michigan. She is the author of All Heathens (Sarabande Books, 2020), which was the winner of the 2021 GLCA New Writers Award, and Leaving Biddle City (Sarabande Books, 2024). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Best American Poetry, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Old Dominion University and teaches poetry in the Warren Wilson College MFA program for Writers.