Award-Winning Poetry and Prose 2024
Winter 2024-2025: Poetry
ERGOT/WESTERN WHEATGRASS
by Nathan Manley
Winner of the 2023 Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award
Entries must be received by December 30
This open poetry manuscript competition gives $1,000 and publication. Manley's Native was the most recent winner. The language of this poem about ergotism, a fungus-borne illness that is thought to have caused religious hallucinations in medieval times, is dense with texture and ornamentation like an elaborate altarpiece.
ETERNITY and THE WOMAN WITH LEAVES FOR HANDS
by Rosanna Young Oh
Winner of the 2024 North American Poetry Book Award
Postmark deadline: January 15
The Poetry Society of Virginia sponsors this $1,000 prize for poetry books published in the previous calendar year. Oh's winning collection The Corrected Version is inspired by her father, a Korean-American immigrant who loved writing but had to put it aside to support his family as a grocer. These poignant selections depict the aging man's mental decline, his thoughts becoming a kind of surreal poetry once again.
ANDREW WYETH'S FOOTNOTES TO LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON, 1992
by Janée J. Baugher
Winner of the 2023 Dorset Prize
Entries must be received by January 31
This award from prestigious publisher Tupelo Press gives $3,000 and a two-week residency in Port Angeles, WA. This ekphrastic poem from her winning collection The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles blends actual quotes from the notable American painter with imagined reflections on what he saw and felt while creating the titular picture.
AMERICAN INCOME
by Afaa M. Weaver
Co-winner of the 2024 Paterson Poetry Prize
Postmark deadline: February 1
This major award from the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College gives $2,000 for the best book of poems published in the preceding calendar year. Weaver's A Fire in the Hills (Red Hen Press) shared the most recent prize with Mahogany L. Browne's Chrome Valley (Liveright Publishing Co.). In this lyrical and compact poem from earlier in his career, Weaver riffs on the literal and metaphorical weight that Black men cannot shed in our society.
Summer 2024: Poetry
WHAT WILL HAPPEN
by Mary Pinard
Winner of the 2021 Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Contest
Entries must be received by August 31
Ex Ophidia Press gives $2,000 and publication for a full-length collection by a poet at any stage of their career. Pinard's Ghost Heart was their most recently published winner. This plain-spoken, elegiac poem knows itself to be an inadequate archive of the material culture of a vanished prairie community.
JULY PRAYER TO SURVIVE THE SUMMER
by Robin Walter
Winner of the 2024 Academy of American Poets First Book Award
Entries must be received by September 1
This prestigious award includes $5,000 and publication by Graywolf Press for a debut collection. Walter was the most recent winner, for Little Mercy. In this lyric whose style echoes Emily Dickinson, the speaker anxiously observes a mother and father bird tending their newborns in the nest.
BIRTHDAY FUGUE
by Jessica Barksdale Inclán
Winner of the 2023 Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition
Entries must be received by October 15
This long-running contest from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies awards $1,000, publication, and 50 copies, and will be judged in 2024 by Pulitzer Prize winner Diane Seuss. Barksdale's collection Let's End This Now was the most recent winner. In this poem, a middle-aged woman debating whether to leave her marriage is haunted by two voices personifying her options.
THE ART MUSEUM
by Zachary Lundgren
Winner of the 2023 Birdy Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by December 1 (don't enter before September 1)
This open poetry manuscript prize from Meadowlark Press offers $1,000, publication, and 50 copies. Lundgren's Turkey Vulture was the most recent winner. This poem's contrapuntal form helps visualize the gulfs perceived by the poem's speaker—between art and the person looking at it, between himself and the young lovers he sees in the museum, and perhaps between the lovers themselves.
Spring 2024: Fiction and Nonfiction
ANAADI'S SMILE
by Nandini Lal
Winner of the 2022 Tobias Wolff Award in Fiction
Entries must be received by March 15
Bellingham Review awards $1,000 apiece for poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction in this annual contest. Lal's fable-like story tells of a young man in rural India, the cherished firstborn son after seven daughters, who dreams of a life beyond supporting his family.
CONFLAGRATION
by Teresa Burns Gunther
Winner of the 2023 Gemini Magazine Short Story Contest
Entries must be received by April 1
This long-running contest offers prizes up to $1,000 and online publication for short fiction. In this tense story, a woman reflects on struggles in her marriage while they prepare to evacuate their home during a wildfire.
MY RED HOT CAPE COD SUMMER
by B. Rosenberg
Winner of the 2023 Sixfold Short Story Award
Entries must be received by April 23
Winners of this poetry and fiction contest receive $1,000 apiece when they receive the most votes in a multi-round competition judged by the entrants. In this witty coming-of-age story, a teen boy navigates the perplexities of family dynamics at a summer beach house and kisses a girl for the first time.
SAVED
by Rebecca T. Godwin
Winner of the 56th New Millennium Writings Awards
Entries must be received by June 30
This twice-yearly contest from a well-regarded literary journal gives prizes of $1,000 apiece for poetry, fiction, flash fiction, and essays. Godwin's Winter 2023 prizewinning story is the poignant tale of a small-town beauty queen who channels her frustrated dreams into supporting her husband's ministry.
