Deadlines: April & May 2025
Every middle of the month: new deadlines, new contests, and new opportunities for your work to find its audience. Here is a roundup of ten submission opportunities with deadlines in April or May, including Academy of American Poets, Zoetic Press, Atlanta Review, and more.
DEADLINE: 4/19
Sonora Review invites writers to submit to our 2025 contest: NOISE. Think noise as the unknowable and affective. Think noise as the discordant, the messy, the simultaneous, the inside and outside, the personal and political. Think white noise, cosmic noise, noisemakers, noise control, noise pollution. What floats around us, apart from and embedded in overworked signifiers and the ever-present compulsion to make sense? What breathing room does noise offer? What the hell is going on here? Did you hear that?
Winners will receive $1000 and publication in Sonora Review. Our poetry contest this year will be judged by Dao Strom.
You may submit 3 to 8 pages of poetry. We are open to (and encourage) creative and experimental interpretations of this theme.
Reading Fee: $20
DEADLINE: 4/28
Submissions are open for Opus II, Issue II of Half Mystic Journal until April 28, 2025.
Our twelfth issue celebrates the theme of sevdah. We’re looking for violin solos, velvet on bare skin, half lights, broken odes, empty airport terminals, redamancy, zinnias at the edge of wilting, damask curtains, clipped swans’ wings, inosculation, heroic crowns, the memory of a late-night lake with a long-gone lover, when the sky and water turned the same colour and met at the edge of the world.
Sevdah is a genre of Turkish and Bosnian folk music evoking sorrowful love and ecstatic, amorous yearning—from the Arabic “sawda,” meaning “black bile,” or a melancholy state of longing. In Issue II of our second opus, desire is holy and heavy as the still before the train comes. Moor us in the unquenchable. We want a begging to believe in.
Submit up to five pieces of up to 3000 words each.
Reading Fee: none
DEADLINE: 4/30
This contest for a first or second full-length poetry collection is open to any poet writing in English who has not yet published more than one full-length book in poetry (poets with multiple chapbooks are eligible), and offers a cash prize of $1,000 and publication by Ghost Peach Press, as well as ten free copies of the published book.
Entries will first be read anonymously by Ghost Peach’s panel of editors, and 2025 judge Paige Lewis will choose the winning collection from ten finalists. All manuscripts should include a title page, table of contents, and an acknowledgements page (if applicable). No identifying information should be included in the submission.
Manuscripts should consist of approximately 48 – 90 pages of poetry (not including front and back matter).
Ghost Peach Press accepts the $25 entry fee exclusively through our Submittable page. The entry fee is due at the time of submission and includes a copy of the winning book upon its publication. For a discounted entry fee that does not include a copy of the book, choose the “2025 Ghost Peach Press Prize in Poetry – No Book” form.
Reading fee: $25
DEADLINE: 4/30
Oxford Poetry: issue 100
We welcome submissions of poems, lyrical essays, and articles with a literary focus. We publish work by emerging as well as established writers, and all submissions are read by the editors. Our issues are not themed beyond focusing on poetry – we welcome work on any subject. We cannot offer individual feedback, but we do aim to respond to submissions within three months. If you are a low-income writer and would like to request free entry, please check our website for details.
We will consider a maximum of 3 poems per submission. Send all poems together in a single document.
Reading Fee: none
DEADLINE: 5/1
Tar River Poetry welcomes submissions to our Ekphrasis Competition, sponsored by the North Carolina Museum of Art.
Writers are invited to submit up to two previously unpublished poems of no more than 30 lines each that respond to works of art. We particularly encourage submissions written about one of the over 16,000 works in the NCMA’s permanent collection, which may be viewed online. For each poem you submit, include the name of the artwork, artist, and image that inspires your work.
Prizes: first place $500, second place $300, third place $100, all published in TRP.
Winners will be invited to read their work in person or via Zoom at the End Paper: NCMA Art Book Fair award ceremony at the North Carolina Museum of Art in September 2025.
The first-place poem will also have a broadside made by Terry Schupbach-Gordon, which will be entered into End Paper’s broadside contest. Sales proceeds of the broadside will go solely to the letterpress artist.
The competition is open to all poets writing in English. The contest reading fee is $22 per submission.
Contestants may submit more than once.
All submissions will be considered for publication in Tar River Poetry. Writers will be contacted if their work is selected for publication.
Reading Fee: $22
DEADLINE: 5/1
Poems must be your original and unpublished creative work, and must not have won a major prize in other contests. Please put all poems in one file, and please number the pages. Do not include identifying information on the poems or file name.
Details:
- Deadline: May 1st. Winners are announced in late summer and are published in the Fall/Winter Issue.
- One Grand Prize winner will receive $1000 and publication. Twenty entrants will receive International Publication Awards, with publication in the contest issue, and a free copy. Thirty entrants will receive International Merit Awards, with recognition in the contest issue, and a free copy.
- Previous Grand Prize winners and associates, friends, or students of the judge(s) are not eligible.
- We offer a flat rate: $16 for 5 poems (total of 10 pages per submission), all in a single file, each poem beginning on a new page. Please do not include more than 5 poems in an individual submission. However, you may make as many submissions as you like, provided you submit the $16 fee each time. (That is to say, please make multiple entries in Submittable to enter more than 5 poems. So, if you wanted to submit 15 poems, you would enter the contest 3 times, and pay the $16 for each submission.)
- We do not accept contest entries by snail mail. Any entries received by mail will be returned unread.
- Please do not submit contest poems to our general submission pool.
Reading fee: $16
DEADLINE: 5/1
Zoetic Press: NBR #40: Epiphany – Poetry
NonBinary Review is currently open for submissions on the theme of EPIPHANY.
It’s a flash of inspiration. It’s a slow realization of something that was in front of you the whole time. It’s seeing something familiar from an entirely unexpected angle. We have these sudden flashes of inspiration all the time – some as subtle as discovering you like tea with honey, others as momentous as realizing that your idea for a new invention could change the world.
We’re looking for speculative takes on epiphany, from the realization that television is all real and true, to the discovery that the life you live in your dreams is your real life, and this one is the dream. We want to be just as surprised as your narrators by the things they discover and where those discoveries lead them.
We’re NOT looking for “I realized I hated my spouse so I left and my life got better” stories, sexual coming of age stories, or anything else that doesn’t fit the speculative genre.
Reading Fee: none
DEADLINE: 5/15
Offered since 1954, the James Laughlin Award is given to recognize and support a second book of poetry forthcoming in the next calendar year. The award was endowed in 1995 by a gift to the Academy from the Drue Heinz Trust. It is named for the poet and publisher James Laughlin (1914-1997), who founded New Directions in 1936.
The winning poet receives a prize of $5,000, an all-expenses-paid weeklong residency at The Betsy Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida, and distribution of the winning book to approximately one thousand Academy of American Poets members.
Submissions are accepted from January 1, 2025 to May 15, 2025 (11:59 p.m. ET). The judges for the 2025 James Laughlin Award are Tyree Daye, Richie Hofmann, and Donika Kelly.
For questions, contact awards@poets.org. Review the eligibility requirements here: https://poets.org/academy-american-poets/james-laughlin-award-guidelines.
Reading Fee: none
DEADLINE: 5/16
What does it mean to be a poet engaged with the physical material of the world around us? How does poetic form change in the encounter with other beings? How do we write collaboratively with—rather than about—nonhuman beings and ecologies?
For the Fall 2025 issue, Arc is seeking experimental eco-poetry that engages with the possibilities of organic form. We welcome experiments with lyric, visual poetics, material poetries, and sound poetries. Submissions should be previously unpublished poetry in English or translations of poetry into English (please confirm you have the appropriate rights and permissions to publish your translation).
Submissions must not exceed three poems or 360 lines of poetry. Arc‘s rate for poetry of $50 per page. Payment is issued upon publication along with one free copy of the issue in which the work appears.
Reading fee: none
DEADLINE: 5/31
Menagerie Magazine: Poetry
Menagerie Magazine houses crafted exhibits of text and art.
Each issue is a curated statement: several poems, fictions, and hybrid works that deserve the close attention of a small stage. Like a Joseph Cornell shadow box, we bring together a mixture of objects. Things both found and made, memories and discoveries, outcast and beloved.
Hybrid and uncategorizable pieces are of interest. Likewise the unwieldy, the absurd, the grotesque. What others may spurn we embrace. We’re less interested in knowing what a thing is than in seeing what it does.
Things we like: fictions ala Borges, Link, Calvino, & Sparks; weird lyric essay; engagements with the environment and natural world; poems that explode form; bricolage, masala, & sagul sagul; forays into the omnipresent information-saturated online architecture we live in.
Things we don’t: lukewarm prose, sentences bereft of emotion, formulaic attempts at being on trend, conformity, pat endings, sentiment-drenched rhyming poems, neat and orderly stories.
This is the menagerie. A shadow box. A pin cushion. A junk drawer. A curio cabinet.
Welcome to our exhibition.
Reading fee: none