HEART Poetry Award
Deadline: August 31, 2023
Nostalgia Press will award $500 and publication in HEART 18 (Winter 2023). Honorable Mentions also published. Visit our home page to view a free digital copy of HEART 17.
- Judge: Grey Held
- $10 entry fee covers 3 poems
- All contestants will receive the Winter 2023 issue of HEART
- Submit prose poems and modern free verse that are insightful, immersing, poignant, and reflective
- Submit unpublished work only
- On each page, please include your name, address, phone number, and email address (this information will be hidden so your work can be judged blind)
- Winners will be announced on the Nostalgia Press website
- Submissions will not be returned
Submit online or mail your entry to:
Nostalgia Press
Attn: HEART Poetry Award
115 Randazzo Drive
Elloree, SC 29047
Please enjoy this poem by Mark MacAllister of Pittsboro, North Carolina, winner of our 2022 HEART Poetry Award:
SAFE IN THE BACKCOUNTRY
Your friends ask if you are nervous
traveling the backcountry
what with the animals
the bears! feral dogs!
uncertain footing steep drop-offs
the meth cookers and mushroom poachers
you tell them that you are never safer
than when you stop on an unmarked road
to eat your sandwich and Oreos
in the tailgate shade
and about the miraculous hot shower
in a jungle camp on the border
between Uganda and Rwanda
how on the way back to your tent
you weaved a flashlit route
between sleeping hippos
how perhaps like Antaeus you grow stronger
every time you sleep on the ground
so far from the people you know
how those you have already lost
the ones you expect to lose soon
those you yourself will be lost to
how for that night at least
they are all the same safe distance away
