Submit To The Colorado Prize for Poetry 2024

The Colorado Prize for Poetry is an international poetry book manuscript contest established in 1995. Each year’s prizewinner receives a $2,500

The Colorado Prize for Poetry 2024

The Colorado Prize for Poetry is an international poetry book manuscript contest established in 1995. Each year’s prizewinner receives a $2,500 honorarium and publication of his or her book by the Center for Literary Publishing

Submission Guidelines 

Manuscripts will be accepted between October 1, 2023, and the postmark deadline of January 14, 2024 (note that we observe a five-day grace period for both paper and online submissions).

The winner will be announced by May 2024.

The winning book-length collection of poems will be published by the Center for Literary Publishing and distributed by the University Press of Colorado in the fall of 2024. The author receives a $2,500 honorarium.

There is a $28 online entry fee, which includes a one-year subscription to Colorado Review (the extra $3 goes to the good people at Submittable). We have a limited number of fee waivers for writers experiencing financial hardship this year. Please email us at creview@colostate.edu to request a waiver. If you were granted a fee waiver in the last two years, please do not request one this year; our policy is to grant them only every three years.

Poets with US addresses may opt for either a print or digital subscription. Poets living outside the US will receive digital subscriptions (as long as a valid e-mail address is  provided). Please select the appropriate submission portal.

The final judge is Brenda Shaughnessy.

Friends and students (current & former) of the final judge are not eligible to compete, nor are Colorado State University employees, students, and alumni.

Entrants must be at least 18 years old.

Manuscripts must be at least 48 pages but no more than 100 pages.

Manuscripts may consist of poems that have been published, but the manuscript as a whole must be unpublished (this includes self-publishing).

In your cover letter, please tell us the manuscript title, your name, address, e-mail address, and phone number. You may supply a bio note here, if you wish, but it is not required.  Your name should NOT appear anywhere else in the manuscript or in the name of the file name.

Please do not include acknowledgments/publication credits of individual poems.

Manuscripts may be double- or single-spaced.

You may enter more than one manuscript. Each manuscript requires the $28 entry fee. If you’d like the additional subscriptions sent to someone other than yourself , include that information in your cover letter. Otherwise, your subscription will be extended by one year for each additional entry.

The theme and style are both open.

Translations are not eligible for the Colorado Prize for Poetry.

Authors do NOT need to be residents of Colorado or the United States. If you are, however, a foreign national working in the United States, please check the conditions of your visa status with regard to receiving payment from entities other than your sponsor. Colorado State University cannot issue honoraria to foreign nationals with B1/WB, B2/WT, H-1B, or F-1 visas. A J-1 visa holder with a sponsor other than CSU must have written authorization from the Responsible Officer (RO) at their sponsoring institution prior to the activity.

Writers should enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope for contest results and a self-addressed stamped postcard for notification of the manuscript’s safe arrival.

Send your entry to:

Colorado Prize for Poetry

Center for Literary Publishing

9105 Campus Delivery

Colorado State University

Fort Collins, CO 80523-9105

Or

Submit Online

Contest Procedures

When your manuscript arrives (if you submit by mail), it is logged into our Colorado Prize database by our office assistant. The top cover sheet (with your name and address) is removed and filed away until the contest is over. Identities of authors submitting their manuscripts online are not visible to any of the judges.

Once all the entries have been received--whether paper or electronic--and the authors’ identities removed, they are divided among six to eight (depending on the total number of entries received) outside preliminary judges; the Center does not use interns to judge for this contest. Each preliminary judge will select three to four manuscripts (depending on the number of preliminary judges we require), for a total of twenty to twenty-four finalists. If a judge recognizes the work of a colleague, student, or friend, he or she contacts the Center and that manuscript is sent to another judge.

The final judge then receives the finalists from which to select the winner. If the final judge wishes to see additional manuscripts from the preliminary judges, he or she may request them; the judge is not, however, permitted to request specific manuscripts. Friends, colleagues, and students (current or former) of the judge are not eligible to compete, and the judge agrees to refrain as well from selecting any manuscript that presents a conflict of interest (selecting, for example, a manuscript he or she has helped to develop)