Frontier Poetry's 2025 Hurt & Healing Prize | $3500 Cash Prizes

The Frontier Poetry's 2025 Hurt and Healing Prize is currently open for submission. Interested writers are invited to submit their best works to win.

Frontier Poetry's 2025 Hurt & Healing Prize

The Frontier Poetry's 2025 Hurt and Healing Prize is currently open for submission. Interested writers are invited to submit their best works to win a total cash prize of $3,500.

About Frontier Poetry's 2025 Hurt & Healing Prize

According the organizers of the competition, this year’s Hurt & Healing Prize is about expressing our pain, but it’s also about celebrating all we have overcome. It is also a call to action—an invitation to support each other in the darkest times. We may feel as if the path forward isn’t clear—but as a community, we answer these questions together.

Cash Prizes for the Frontier Poetry's 2025 Hurt & Healing Prize

The first place winner will receive $3,000 and publication. Second- and third-place winners will receive $300 and $200 respectively, as well as publication.

 

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Other Ongoing Writing Competitions

• The Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest 2025 | $150 Cash Prize
• St. Gallen Symposium Global Essay Competition 2025 | CHF 20,000
• 2025 Centre for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) Book Prize | $3,000 Cash Prize 
• Deep Wild Journal's Waking to the Wild 2025 Student Contest
• The James Laughlin Award 2025 | $5,000 Cash Prize and Residency 
• The 2025 Zócalo Poetry Prize Honors Poems of Place | $1,000 Cash Prize 
• Frontier Poetry's 2025 Hurt & Healing Prize | $3500 Cash Prizes 
• Pennacle's Pen on Fire Writing Competition and Workshop 2025

About the Judge: 

Robert Wood Lynn is a poet from Virginia. He is the author of the collection Mothman Apologia (Yale University Press, 2022) and the chapbook How to Maintain Eye Contact (Button Poetry, 2023). He is the recipient of the 2021 Yale Younger Poets Prize, the 2023 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and a 2023 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship. His work has been featured in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, POETRY, The Yale Review, and other publications. He teaches poetry at Juilliard and Brooklyn Poets.

What the judge is looking for: 

I am honored to be asked to jury Frontier’s poetry contest themed on hurt and healing, because so much of the work of poetry happens in this space of change—hurt and healing not simply or even necessarily as subject but as experience, since that is what a poem is: an experience rather than a recounting. I am interested in poems that wound us gently, or that restore something inside us, or both. Poems that help us reach the interior and emotional spaces no other medium could. That let language work indirectly, through image, metaphor, surprise, and play, to accomplish things impossible in straightforward retelling.

Submission Guidelines for the Frontier Poetry's 2025 Hurt & Healing Prize

1. Submissions are open to new and emerging writers (for this contest, we define this as poets with no more than one full-length published work forthcoming at the time of submission). 
2. Send up to three poems per submission, for a total of no more than five pages. We have no aesthetic or formal requirements and consider all styles of poetry. Each new submission requires a $20 reading fee. 
3. As part of our dedication to the pursuit of a more inclusive publishing world, we offer a free submission window for poets from historically marginalized groups (BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, disabled community, et cetera) at the beginning of the contest until our cap of fifty. This submission category has reached its cap and is now closed.
4. Do not include any identifying information in the body of your document.
5. Please submit unpublished poems only.
6. We welcome simultaneous submissions, but please notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
7. You may submit multiple times, but each submission requires a separate $20 fee.
8. Please provide a brief cover letter that includes a short, third-person bio with your publication history and any applicable content warnings.
9. Submissions are open internationally, to any poet writing in English. Inclusion of other languages is welcome, as long as the poem is primarily written in English.
10. Please do not submit work if you have a personal relationship with the judge.
11. If you haven’t already, please verify your email address with Submittable for more consistent communication.
12. We will not accept AI-generated work for this contest.
13. If you have any questions, please visit our FAQ page first. If you don’t find the answer to your question, you can send an email to contact (at) frontierpoetry (dot) com.

Submit Here