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. You can find her feature in LINE LEVEL: Poets of Color on Craft here.

What our judge is looking for: 

I want to read that one oddball poem that refuses to belong in your book—the one too irreverent for your mother, too unsettling for your roommate, too ruckus for your most ruckus friend. I want to read the sonnet about your bunions, the ode to frozen burritos, the anti-ode to the rising seas. Give me your reverse abecedarian, your sideways contrapuntal, your jumbled sestina, your warped rondeau redoublé. I want to read a poem that is willing to be uncertain, willing to be wrong. I want to read a poem that--in the strangest and most electrifying way--speaks truth to power. I want to read poems that are awake to their own powers. Give me the poem that upends everything I thought I knew about poetry, the one that makes me want to do what you’re doing, have what you’re having.