Award-Winning Poetry and Prose 2023
Winter 2023-2024: Poetry
[WANTING TO BE A SERVANT OF NO ONE AND WANTING TO COMPEL SERVICE FROM NO ONE]
by Katie Berta
Winner of the 2024 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by December 31
This prestigious award from Ohio University Press gives $1,000 and publication for a full-length poetry collection. Berta's retribution forthcoming was the most recent winner. This theological prose-poem, by turns oracular and colloquial, faults the binary of dominance and submission for its lack of imagination, while acknowledging how easy it is to fall into these habitual stances.
ORACLE
by Trey Moody
Winner of the 2023 Robert H. Winner Memorial Award
Entries must be received by December 31
This long-running award from the Poetry Society of America gives $1,000 and web publication for a poem by an author over 40 who has published no more than one book. Moody's stream-of-consciousness poem alludes to other famous poems' images with a knowing wink, highlighting the difficulty of experiencing the present moment without an overlay of interpretation.
VOID POSES
by Gale Marie Thompson
Winner of the 2023 Colorado Prize for Poetry
Postmark Deadline: January 14
This competitive prize for a poetry manuscript awards $2,500 and publication by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University. Thompson's Mountain Amnesia was the most recent winner. This fragmented poem repeatedly returns to, then looks away from, media images of violence that are so common as to have their own clichés associated with them.
UNTITLED SUGAR POEM
by Giovannai Rosa
Winner of the 2022 Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Contest
Entries must be received by May 22 (don't enter before March 1)
Ploughshares, the prestigious literary journal of Emerson College, gives prizes of $2,000 and literary agent review for poetry, fiction, and essays by authors who have not published or self-published a book. Rosa's winning poem, selected by Chen Chen, depicts sugar cravings as both the source of colonialist trauma and the way that their Puerto Rican family soothes that trauma.
Summer 2023: Poetry
ELIZABETH BISHOP INJECTS HERSELF WITH ADRENALINE FOR ASTHMA
by Susan Okie
Winner of the 2023 Off the Grid Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by August 31
This contest for full-length poetry manuscripts by authors aged 60 and older gives $1,000 and publication by Off the Grid Books in print and audiobook formats. Okie's collection Woman at the Crossing was the most recent winner. The speaker of this narrative poem imagines inhabiting a body that has been brought to a pitch of heightened energy and sensations, a state that may be medically induced but overlaps with the mental discipline of poetry.
THE BLUE MIMES/LOS MIMOS AZULES
by Sara Daniele Rivera
Winner of the 2023 Academy of American Poets First Book Award
Entries must be received by September 1
This prestigious award for a first full-length collection by a US citizen or legal resident gives $5,000, publication by Graywolf Press, and a writing residency in Italy. The title poem of Rivera's prizewinning book weaves back and forth between English and Spanish stanzas, past and present events, as the narrator tends a family member whose memories are slipping away.
EPITHALAMIUM
by Stacy Gnall
Co-winner of the 2022 Juniper Prize for Poetry
Entries must be received by September 30
This long-running poetry series from the University of Massachusetts Press gives two prizes of $1,000 and publication, one for a debut full-length collection and the other for a collection by a poet at any stage of their career. An epithalamium is a wedding poem, but in this poem from Gnall's winning book Dogged, the human couple does not appear directly; rather, their passion seems to have brought them into psychic union with animals, plants, and other beings that communicate without human language.
DEEP SOUTH GRAFFITI and other poems
by Éric Morales-Franceschini
Winner of the 2022 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry
Entries must be received by September 30
This prestigious poetry manuscript contest from Fresno State University gives $2,000 and publication by Anhinga Press. Morales-Franceschini's debut book, Syndrome, was the most recent winner. This vivid poem jump-cuts between moments of familial love and racist attacks on his Puerto Rican family, giving the lie to the patriotic ideals whose imagery pervades their Southern town.
Spring 2023: Fiction and Nonfiction
THE WOMEN IN THE CLUB
by P. Jo Anne Burgh
Winner of the 2022 Gemini Magazine Short Story Contest
Entries must be received by March 31
This long-running contest gives prizes up to $1,000 and publication in an online journal that is welcoming toward emerging writers. Burgh's heart-wrenching story slowly reveals what this group of mothers has in common, and how one family struggles with the limits of loyalty.
NUMBER EIGHT DAUGHTER
by Jeannie Tseng
Winner of the Fall 2021 Narrative Magazine Story Contest
Entries must be received by March 31
Narrative Magazine offers several contests each year, with prizes up to $2,500 and web publication for literary short fiction and essays. The Winter 2023 contest is open through March 31. Tseng's story is set in a rural Chinese household where surplus daughters and disabled children have to fend for themselves from an early age.
THE POWER OF WORDS
by Lauren St. George
Winner of the April 2022 Tadpole Press 100-Word Writing Contest
Entries must be received by April 30
This twice-yearly contest gives $1,000 and website publication for a work of flash poetry or prose, 100 words maximum. The 2023 theme is "using humor as healing". Scroll down the winners' page for the most recent results. St. George's short-short story captures a moment of welcome for a refugee.
THE UNSEEN
by Treanor Wooten Baring
Winner of the Spring 2022 Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award
Entries must be received by April 30
This twice-yearly contest gives $1,500 and web and anthology publication for a story with a supernatural or magical-realism theme. In Baring's atmospheric tale, a Mississippi debutante's tryst with her boyfriend is interrupted by apparitions from her family's slave-owning past, alerting her to inequalities that continue to bleed into the present.
