Award-Winning Poetry and Prose 2026
Summer 2026: Poetry
MOON RIVER and other poems
by Anya Johnson
Winner of the 2025 Bob Hicok Fellowship for Poets
Entries must be received by August 31
This award from Only Poems gives $1,000, a workshop credit worth $1,000, online publication, and an author interview for a suite of 5-10 pages of poetry. Johnson's passionate poems with noir urban settings depict the perils and misunderstandings of female desire in a man's world.
GATHERING LEAVES IN A PANDEMIC and SONOGRAM
by Catherine Stearns
Winner of the 2026 Off the Grid Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by August 31
This prize of $1,000 and manuscript publication by Grid Books is open to poets aged 60+. Stearns' collection Out Toward Morning was the most recent winner. These brief poems are studies in contrasts, noticing natural processes that inspire hope against the odds.
PINE, N. AND V.
by Lindsay Stuart Hill
Winner of the 2024 Brittingham Prize in Poetry
Entries must be received by September 15
The University of Wisconsin Press offers this venerable award of $1,500 plus book publication. Hill's winning collection was World of Dew. This formally inventive pair of poems, dedicated to a Buddhist nun, rearranges the same phrases in a different order, meditating both times upon themes of longing and sufficiency.
DRINKING ROTHAUS IN BED
by Christian Wessels
Winner of the 2024 Juniper Prize for Poetry
Entries must be received by September 30
This long-running award series from the University of Massachusetts Press selects two manuscripts a year for publication and a $1,000 prize. Wessels won for his debut collection Who Follow the Gleam. The unpunctuated lines and capital letters in the middle of sentences capture the run-on speech patterns of a desperate yet defiant woman in this poignant narrative poem.
Spring 2026: Fiction and Nonfiction
GREETINGS FROM THE DESERT
by Emily Bales
Winner of the 2025 Narrative Magazine Winter Story Contest
Entries must be received by March 31
This well-regarded online magazine gives prizes up to $2,500 for short fiction and creative nonfiction up to 15,000 words (all genres compete together). In Bales' retrospective coming-of-age story, the speaker remembers being an aspiring writer in New York City who becomes involved with the father of a student she is tutoring. You will have to create a free account at Narrative to read the full text.
WE LEFT
by Dana Diehl
Winner of the 2024 Hudson Prize
Entries must be received by March 31
Black Lawrence Press gives $1,000 and publication for a collection of poetry or short stories (both genres compete together). Diehl's fabulist fiction collection The Earth Room was the most recently published winner. This story takes place in a Southwestern mountain cabin, where a group of young women calling themselves a "support group for girls with beastly boyfriends" discuss problems that are both fantastical and sadly familiar.
KESH
by Joseph Bathanti
Winner of the 2025 Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award
Entries must be received by April 30
This twice-yearly contest from online journal The Ghost Story gives awards up to $1,500 and publication for a short story with supernatural elements. In Bathanti's atmospheric tale, an Italian-American boy accompanies his mother to visit two mysterious elders who promise to help her conceive a child through folk magic.
