Awarded for the best unpublished poem by a student in grades 9 through 12 from the United States. Submit here.
GUIDELINES
- Personal identification cannot appear in the submission document anywhere.
- Only one entry per author.
- Submissions by more than one author are not eligible.
- You cannot submit the same poem to more than one award.
- The submission must not have been previously published or accepted for publication.
- Simultaneous submissions are acceptable; please withdraw the submission if the poem is accepted elsewhere for publication.
- Translations are not eligible. All poems must be original and primarily in English.
- A poem that has previously won a Poetry Society of America award cannot be resubmitted to any of the awards.
- We cannot accept corrections after submission.
- Submissions from Poetry Society employees, officers, or advisory board committee members are ineligible.
A SINGLE POEM
- The fee is $5 for this award.
MULTIPLE POEMS FROM A TEACHER
- The fee is $20 for this award.
If you are a teacher submitting multiple poems, please upload all the poems in one document without any identifying information about the authors.
In a second document, upload the following contact information for each entry: Poem Title, First Line, email address of author, and email address of teacher.
ABOUT THE JUDGE
Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series 2020), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and the editor of Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets’ Anthology (Sarabande 2023). She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, the American Poetry Review, and The Atlantic, among others, as well as in commissions for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Arts (LACMA).