Rattle Poetry Prize
Deadline: July 15, 2026
The annual Rattle Poetry Prize celebrates its 21st year with a 1st prize of $15,000 for a single poem. Ten finalists will also receive $500 each and publication, and be eligible for the $5,000 Readers' Choice Award, to be selected by subscriber and entrant vote. All of these poems will be published in the winter issue of the magazine.
With the winners judged in an anonymized review by the editors to ensure a fair and consistent selection, an entry fee that is simply a one-year subscription to the magazine—and a large Readers' Choice Award to be chosen by the writers themselves—we've designed the Rattle Poetry Prize to be one of the most inspiring contests around.
Past winners have included a retired teacher, a lawyer, and several students. It's fair, it's friendly, and you receive a print subscription to Rattle even if you don't win.
We accept entries online via Submittable. See Rattle's website for the complete guidelines and to read all of the past winners.
Please enjoy the very first Rattle Poetry Prize winning poem by Sophia Rivkin, published in Rattle #26, Winter 2006:
CONSPIRACY
The husband calls from two hundred miles away
to say he cannot stand it, his wife is dying
in a rented hospital bed in their living room
and he must put her away, somewhere, anywhere,
in a nursing home and she is crying looking up at him
through the bars like a caged animal—
she is an animal with foul green breath
and buttocks burnt raw with urine—
he cannot lift her, he cannot change her often enough,
and she is crying for the children’s pictures on the mantle,
she cannot leave the silver candlesticks,
the high school graduation pictures.
And I say, yes, it is time to put her away,
I am the friend and I say it,
the living conspiring with the living,
death standing like a Nazi general or a stormtrooper
with a huge cardboard chest covered with metals,
and he leans over her and pins a gold star
through her skin and it pricks us,
pricks us through the brain,
through our skin
but we do not bleed
when death is pushing her
out of her bed, marching her away,
while everyone stands white-faced
among the white-faced crowd,
blending in, blending in.
