P – Frontier Poetry 2022 Chapbook Contest

The 2022 Chapbook Contest

Closes May 15, 2022

Chapbooks are a huge milestone for poets, and we’re always looking forward to the Frontier Digital Chapbook Contest—where we get to find that one electric bundle of poems that rocks our world in less than 30 pages. We welcome manuscripts that need some polishing as our editors are always looking forward to working with the authors to make the book the best it can be for publication in 2023.

The winner of the Chapbook Contest will receive $2000 and publication of the free, downloadable chapbook on Frontier, and 50 physical author copies to share and sell. Most exciting of all: the chapbook will also be distributed to tens of thousands of readers, editors, agents, and magazines through our newsletter. Don’t underestimate the power of this reach to empower your career as a poet. You can read our 2018 Winner, Xiao Yue Shan’s How Often I Have Chosen Love, and our 2019 Winner, Shadow Black by Naima Tokunow, was selected by Jericho Brown! In the Year of our Making & Unmaking by Frederick Speers was selected by Carl Phillips to be our winner in 2020. Currently, they have over 20,000 views / downloads combined.

Our 2021 winner, Abigail Johnson’s Opportunity Cost will be published in May 2022.

Our guest judge Tom Sleigh will select the winner this year from ten finalists selected by our editorial team. Tom Sleigh is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently House of Fact, House of Ruin; Station Zed; Army Cats; and Space Walk, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He is also the author of two essay collections, The Land between Two Rivers: Writing in an Age of Refugees and Interview with a Ghost. Sleigh teaches at Hunter College and lives in New York. He published his eleventh collection, The King’s Touch, on February 1st with Graywolf Press.

Thank you for giving us the chance to be made better writers ourselves in reading your work! Good luck, and see you on the other side.

Best, Josh — Editor of Frontier Poetry

Guidelines for submission

• Contest is open for US and international poets, but the poems must be in English.
• Poets of any publication history are welcome to apply.
• Manuscript should be 10-30 pages. Over 30 pages because of front/back matter is okay.
• Manuscript should be on the whole unpublished, although individual poems can be previously published.
• Simultaneous submissions are welcome, but please notify us if the chapbook is accepted elsewhere.
• Multiple submissions are allowed, but each chapbook must be submitted individually.
• Do not include bio information in the manuscript itself.
• Please put any acknowledgements in the cover letter field of submittable and not in the manuscript.
• We will announce the winners in early August 2022.
• To view a list of the most commonly asked questions about submitting to us, please see our FAQ page.