Most events are installed on their deadline date, unless there is a long submission window or unless it's a rolling submission.
P=Poetry, N=Nonfiction, F=Fiction
In our pursuit of gentleness, nostalgia, and a reimagining of “home,” Frontier Poetry is reviving the Nature & Place Prize. In her poem “Drowning Creek,” Ada Limón takes us into the countryside, “Past the strip malls and the power plants, / out of the holler, past Gun Bottom Road / and Brassfield and before Red Lick Creek, / there’s a stream called Drowning Creek….” On her journey, she has the strong urge to stop the car and observe the kingfisher perched on the transmission wire “eyeing the creek / for crayfish, tadpoles, and minnows.” She has aptly combined the urge to be in communion with nature, with the visceral landscape of place observed from the loneliness of a car ride. In this same vein, we invite you to submit work to the 2024 Nature & Place Prize.
We’re looking for poems rich and robust in language, technique, and form that pay homage to the natural world and all of the small marvels that occur in nature. We’re also interested in poems that observe geography and the landscape of home. Frontier Poetry warmly encourages poets of all backgrounds, identities, and ethnicities to enter.
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. All shortlisted writers will also be considered for paid publication in New Voices.
Flower Conroy is a LGBTQIA+ artist, NEA and MacDowell Fellow, and former Key West Poet Laureate. Conroy’s books include Snake Breaking Medusa Disorder (winner of the Stevens Manuscript Prize), A Sentimental Hairpin (Eric Hoffer Finalist), and Greenest Grass (winner of the Blue Lynx Poetry prize). Her work has appeared/is forthcoming in New England Review, American Literary Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Currently she is curating a series of Ephemeral Altars that celebrate poetry collections through assemblage art.
When I initially heard the theme “Nature & Place,” I had a confident (albeit vague) idea what that might mean; however, the more I thought about it, my sense of nature and place became excitingly less certain, amorphous, vast. I want (from these submissions) what I’d want from any poem: I want to encounter that which I didn’t know I needed to encounter; I want surprise of detail and syntax, for a microcosm of a perspective and language (or languages) to flesh out a world I get lost in, to be entranced by keenness of being and experience retold; I want nuance, subtext, and imagery to awe me. The theme of “Nature & Place” strikes me as abstractly concrete and concretely abstract—it conjures landscape, yes, but perhaps landscape as a presence in relation to a self or selves. It’s flesh and dirt, past and future, internal and external. I’ve no preconceived notions of what the poems should be beyond being visceral.
This option costs $59 and will provide you with two pages of detailed and actionable feedback on your submission, including suggestions for future submissions. The $149 option will provide you with three letters from three different editors. Our guest editors are paid a significant portion of the fee and all are astute and professional poets. Please allow eight to ten weeks after the contest closes to receive your feedback letter.