Submission Guidelines
2026 Hurt & Healing Prize
January 5 to March 8, 2026
In the dawn of the new year, Frontier Poetry is excited to announce the 2026 Hurt & Healing Prize.
To harbor life in ourselves is an act of courage. Milenka Aurelio once said that “[our] bodies hold memories, trauma, joy, and potential all at once.” We carry the whole of our histories—both personal and collective—within our bodies. What we carry is not only tranquility, passion, or joy; we also move forward holding it all, and learning to live in a kind of awkward, strange, contradictory, and miraculous harmony with pain. The clumsiness and triumph of this journey is what we call healing—what inspires hope.
With the 2026 Hurt & Healing Prize, we invite you to recall your journeys through the entanglement of pain and restoration. Frontier Poetry seeks poems that explore grief, loss, heartache, and the imperfect path taken to reach the ongoing work of healing. Whether your poetry is authored in the midst of anguish or written from the other side, we welcome work that is transparent, honest, and poetically resonant.
Frontier Poetry welcomes all interpretations of both hurting and healing. We proudly encourage submissions from poets of all identities, cultures, and backgrounds.
Guest judge Gbenga Adesina will select the winners. The first-place winner will receive $3,000 and publication. The second- and third-place winners will receive $300 and $200, respectively, along with publication. All finalists will be considered for paid publication in New Voices.
The contest opens January 5th and closes March 8th, 2026.
Further reading for inspiration can be found here:
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:
Gbenga Adesina, Nigerian poet and essayist, received his MFA from New York University where he was a Goldwater Poetry Fellowship and was mentored by Yusef Komunyakaa. He has received support from the Poets House, New York; Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown; Colgate University’s Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship; Folger Shakespeare’s Library, Washington DC; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Harlem; and Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University. His work has been published in the Paris Review, Harvard Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, Guernica, Narrative, The Best American Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere, and has been translated into six languages. He is the cofounder and editor of A Long House, a journal of diasporic art, thought, and literature. He received a PhD with emphasis on Poetry from Florida State University and is the inaugural Mellon Foundation Post-doctoral Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic Poetry at the Furious Flower Poetry Center, James Madison University. His debut book of poems, Death Does Not End At The Sea, won the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry.
What our judge is looking for:
I'm looking for surprise and an awareness of language as an architectural device. I'm looking for a voice with multiple rooms inside it. I'm looking for an alertness to the world, a sense of history’s music, and how that music lives publicly and privately inside us. I'm interested in the irreducible fire of a visionary mind that conceives of language as a dance. I want to be compelled by how a poem conceives of hurt and healing, how it subverts our ideas and notions of what it means to hurt or heal, how it collapses and ruptures our neat partitions of these ideas, how it transforms words, experiences, and realities. I want the emotional clarity of a Nina Simone song, the gravitas of a Rap Ellison sentence, and the levitation and grace of a hymn. Actually, scratch all the above, I’m looking for you to, as the kids say, put me in my feels.
Guidelines:
- Submissions are open to new and emerging writers (for this contest, we define this as poets with no more than one full-length work of poetry published or forthcoming at the time of submission).
- 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.
- 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.
- Do not include any identifying information in the body of your document.
- Please submit unpublished poems only.
- We welcome simultaneous submissions, but please notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
- You may submit multiple times, but each submission requires a separate $20 fee.
- Please provide a brief cover letter that includes a short, third-person bio with your publication history and any applicable content warnings.
- 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.
- Please do not submit work if you have a personal relationship with the judge.
- If you haven’t already, please verify your email address with Submittable for more consistent communication.
- We will not accept AI-generated work for this contest.
- 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 a poem of your choice from your packet, 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.
New Voices
Always open. Always free.
We are thrilled to offer significant payment to our partner poets: $50 per poem.
We warmly invite poets from historically under-represented and marginalized groups to submit. Our aim is to be an accurate representation of the diversity of our community. Your voice is valued here.
Guidelines
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- Submissions are open to new and emerging poets only (no more than one full-length published work of poetry out in the world or forthcoming at the time of submission. For information about self-published works and pieces published via personal or social media pages, please see our FAQ page below).
- Frontier Poetry does not consider or review AI-generated work. Submissions utilizing AI tools will be automatically declined.
- We accept simultaneous submissions—just please send us a note if your work is picked up elsewhere (we want to say congrats)!
- All submissions must be no more than ten pages and no more than five poems.
- We do not accept multiple submissions. Please submit all your poems in ONE document.
- Please include a cover letter with your publication history.
- Expect eight to twelve weeks for a response.
- To view a list of our most commonly asked questions regarding submitting to us, please see our FAQ page.
Submission Options
- New Voices Free – Always a free way to submit and we always pay for the work. We pay new poets $50 per poem selected. Response time is eight to twelve weeks.
- New Voices Editorial Letter – If you’re interested in knowing a little bit more about what we thought of your poem, utilize this option. When we’ve reviewed your piece we will include one to two pages of feedback on your poem including suggestions for revision, where it might be a good fit for publication, and other comments about ways it can be improved. It’s our way of helping you to understand your work better and improve. Our editors are paid a significant portion of the fee.
- New Voices Fast Response – It can be hard to wait to hear back, so we've developed a quicker turnaround time for writers who want to hear back within two weeks. There is a reading fee for this category.
- New Voices Free Fast Response for BIPOC – Our quick turnaround option offered for free to Black, Indigenous, and other writers of color.
Unless specifically requested, we do not accept AI-generated work.
Author's Rights
Frontier Poetry holds first publication rights for three months after publication, after which rights revert to the author. Authors agree not to publish, nor authorize or permit the publication of, any part of the material for three months following first publication. For reprints, we ask for acknowledgment of publication in Frontier Poetry first.
