We found over three dozen excellent free poetry and prose contests with deadlines between April 15-May 31. In this issue, we preview three images from "Giacomo Joyce" by James Joyce, illustrated by Julian Peters. Annie Mydla describes "The Autism Parent Memoir I'd Love to Read". And a subscriber reports that "Lions Gate Productions" wants to turn her book into a movie, if only she would send them $4,500. If you have a tip, recommendation, or warning, please email it to info@winningwriters.com.

Winners of our Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest
 

D.T. CHRISTENSEN and SERRINA ZOU won the top awards of $3,500 each in our 22nd annual Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Contest co-sponsor Duotrope awarded our winners two-year gift certificates (value $100) to access Duotrope's extensive literary information services. Visit the winners' pages to read their poems and see the original art we commissioned from Helen Bar-Lev and Rowan Fridley.

We received 2,481 submissions from around the world (over 7,000 poems). We awarded 10 Honorable Mentions and $300 to Jay Aja, Ceren Ege, R.H. Alexander, Lance Larsen, Carla Schick, Jennifer Tubbs, Shelly Cato, Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda, Em McCoy, and Elinor Ann Walker. We further recognize these finalists: Carlos Andrés Gómez and Maurya Kerr.

Read our press release, and read all the winning entries selected by Michal 'MJ' Jones with assistance from Briana Grogan and Dare Williams. We would also like to acknowledge the dedicated administrative support provided by Annie Mydla and her staff in Poland. Our judges will return for our 23rd contest opening today. The top two prizes remain $3,500, and we will now award $500 to each Honorable Mention. The entry fee is $25 for 1-3 poems. Enter here.

Last Call!
LIVE AND LET DEI
Deadline: April 30. Submit to Live and Let DEI, a free downloadable digital anthology of original poems that make creative use of the words that the Trump administration has banned from government websites and research papers. Poets of any age and nationality welcome. There's no fee and no prizes, just notoriety and justice. Learn more and enter here.

Last Call!
TOM HOWARD/JOHN H. REID FICTION & ESSAY CONTEST
Deadline: May 1. 33rd year. $12,000 in prizes, including two top awards of $3,500 each. Fee: $25 per entry. Final judge: Mina Manchester. Both unpublished and previously published work accepted. See last year's winners and enter here.

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Deadline: May 15, 2025

The Press Pause Press Beautiful Pause Prize 2025 contest is open for full-length poetry manuscripts! The Beautiful Pause Prize is a yearly prize of $1,000 and the print publication of a full-length manuscript awarded to a writer of exceptional talent and heart.

One runner-up will receive $500 and publication of an excerpt in one of our biannual print volumes.

Send us whatever is in your hearts! We publish beautiful books. Details and guidelines can be found on our website.

Congratulations to Judith Barrington, Alice McVeigh, Chen Du, Geoffrey Heptonstall, Christina Pickard, Ellen Sazzman, Donna Baier Stein, Tobey Kaplan (featured poem: "nighthawks"), Terri Kirby Erickson, Charles Sartorius, Duane L. Herrmann, and Shanna McNair.

Winning Writers Editor Jendi Reiter received a $5,000 poetry fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council in their 2025 Grants for Creative Individuals funding cycle. In other news, their novel Origin Story is a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Award for LGBTQ Fiction. Winners will be announced in June. Their poem "These Characters and Themes Cannot Exist" was published in Exist Otherwise, Issue #14 (April 2025).

Learn about our subscribers' achievements and see links to samples of their work.

Have news? Please email it to jendi@winningwriters.com.

Do you use TikTok or Instagram? Send your news to the @winningwriters account so we can share it!

Deadline extended to April 15, 11:59pm PST

The Perkoff Prize awards $1,000 and publication each to writers of the best story, set of poems, and essay that engage in evocative ways with health, wellness, and medicine as judged by the editors.

Guidelines:

• All submissions must engage with health and medicine in some way.
• All submissions must be previously unpublished.
• Poetry: up to 10 pages of poetry.
• Fiction and Nonfiction: up to 8,500 words, double-spaced.
• Winners will be published in print issue of TMR.
• Check out the prizewinners and finalists from last year's contest here. Winners will be announced in late 2025.
• All entries will be considered for publication (whether in print, or as part of our Poem of the Week or Blast features).
• Multiple submissions and simultaneous submissions are welcome, but you must pay a separate fee for each entry and withdraw the piece immediately if accepted elsewhere.
• Standard Entry fee: $15. Each entrant receives a one-year subscription to the Missouri Review in digital format (normal price $24).
• "All Access" Entry fee: $30. In addition to the one-year digital subscription to the Missouri Review, the "All Access" entry fee grants access to the last 10 years of digital issues and the audio recordings of each digital issue.

Submit Online
Submit By Mail (short downloadable form in .docx format)

Ellen Sazzman won the 2025 Bill Hickok Award for Humor in Poetry for her poem "A Garden of Remembrance". Allison Joseph made the selection for I-70 Review. It will be published in September.

The award was created and funded by the N.W. Dible Foundation in honor of Bill Hickok, past president of the Foundation. Bill Hickok began writing humor many years ago as a defense against his children's tyranny. He maintained that if a story is worth telling, it's worth exaggerating—hence the title of his poetry book: The Woman Who Shot Me.

Lauren Singer is the longtime first-round judge of the Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest. We're pleased to announce her debut poetry collection, Raised Ranch, goes on sale on April 29. Published by Game Over Books, Raised Ranch takes the reader room by room in a house overrun with the detritus left behind by pregnancy loss, divorce, the confrontation of childhood trauma, and the clumsy attempts one makes while putting life back together.

Raised Ranch is the house that grief built. These painfully funny and open-hearted poems attest to a time when we were forced to shelter in place with our shadows. Trailed by the ghosts of a ripped-apart marriage and a stillborn child, the speaker moves through the showplace of perfection that no real woman can live up to, and wonders how it's possible to fail at adulthood when she never had a childhood. Maybe one day, she'll permit herself to have as healthy a relationship as her cat has with the mailman. Until then, there's the animal self-love of "porridge where all the raisins spell out 'mercy'". You'll cry till you laugh, and cry again, wanting to hold this character (and yourself) with a little more tenderness before you walk out the door.

—Jendi Reiter, author of Made Man and Origin Story, editor of Winning Writers

Click here to read more and purchase the book.

Annie Mydla screens many, many memoirs for our North Street Book Prize. When she encounters autism parent memoirs, she hopes to see solidarity with autistic people. "It would be wonderful to see narratives by parents who are going the extra mile to be not only autism parents, but autism allies."

APMs are often a way for the memoirist to vent and connect with other autism parents. That's wonderful—parents of autistic children need and deserve validation and solidarity.

On the other hand, writing exclusively for other non-autistic parents of autistic children can lead memoirists to write as though no autistic person will ever read their book. As a result of this, the content and language can become exploitative and dehumanizing without the non-autistic writer even realizing what's going on. Autistic readers, though, will pick up on these things immediately.

Read on.

Application deadline: May 15, 2025

Join renowned authors and professional park educators for a writers conference like no other, set on a lush, secluded campus nestled within America's most-visited national park. Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont partners with Smokies Life to bring this five-day intensive retreat to a small group of selected writers.

Apply to be a part of your chosen cohort: fiction, nonfiction, or poetry—and enjoy the benefits of award-winning author workshop leaders dedicated to focusing on you and your work. Days will be devoted to learning and writing in small groups. Each afternoon, writers will have the option to join experienced Tremont naturalists for guided explorations that spark curiosity and wonder through a deeper connection to the region's cultural and natural history. Evenings will conclude with hearty dinners, fellowship with peers, and readings by the writing faculty.

Apply now for the Tremont Writers Conference.

Deadline: May 31, 2025

• Judge: Ellen Bass, Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets
• Prize: $1,000 and print publication by Two Sylvias Press, 20 copies of the winning book, and an amethyst Depression-era glass trophy (circa 1930)

The Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize is open to all poets (previously published or not). Manuscripts should be 17-24 pages long. Simultaneous submissions are accepted. All manuscripts will be considered for publication.

Ellen Bass's most recent collection, Indigo, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Her other poetry books include Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Her poems appear frequently in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and many other journals. Among her awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, and the California Arts Council, the Lambda Literary Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. She co-edited the first major anthology of women's poetry, No More Masks!, and her nonfiction books include the groundbreaking The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse and Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth. A Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz, California jails, and teaches in the MFA writing program at Pacific University.

Past Winners: Zachary Kluckman, Andrew Robin, Majda Gama, Saúl Hernández, Meg Griffitts, Cecilia Woloch, Jasmine An, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Hiwot Adilow, Stella Wong, and Christopher Salerno.

Created with the belief that great writing is good for the world, Two Sylvias Press is an award-winning publisher that has been featured in O, The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Forbes, NPR, and other noted outlets. It offers the nationally recognized Poet Tarot Guidebook: A Deck of Creative Exploration and the Weekly Muse, a project to help poets write and publish more poems.

Click here for full guidelines for the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize

Thank you for your support of our indie press during this time! Looking forward to reading your poems!

"A haunting, powerful debut that lingers long after the final page."

In the unforgiving wilderness of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where men bury their grief in work, whiskey, and violence, twelve-year-old Leif loses both his parents in the space of a year. Alone and burdened by a secret he cannot share, he must survive in a world where grief hardens into violence—and love is as dangerous as loss.

THE FALLER is a stark but redemptive coming-of-age story praised as "stunningly evocative" and "beautifully understated".

Read the North Street critique and a sample from the book.

Buy THE FALLER on Amazon.

A subscriber writes, "In September 2024, I received an email from Lions Gate Productions wanting to turn my novel into a movie, but I was to send them the novel in PDF form, provide them with a movie trailer, book reviews, a screenplay and a signed agreement. If I didn't want to do that, they had someone who could do it for $4,500.

"This was flagged as spam, but I regularly check my spam folder because occasionally something legitimate lands there.

"This is not the first time I have received an email from someone who was able to do just enough digging into a real business, in this case Lions Gate Productions, to try to scam me out of money."

There's more discussion about this scam on Reddit.

For more scam-busting advice, see our Contests and Services to Avoid page and Writer Beware.

Have a tip, recommendation, or warning? Please email it to us at info@winningwriters.com.

Deadline: June 15, 2025

$500 will be awarded to the Grand Prize winner of The MacGuffin's POET HUNT 30. Darrel Alejandro Holnes judges this year's contest. Up to two Honorable Mention poems may also be published along with the names of the finalists and semifinalists. All entrants will receive a copy of the issue that includes the judge's selections.

Send up to five poems per $15 entry fee. Include a cover page that lists your contact info and poem titles or leave this information in your Submittable form. This should be the only place containing personally identifiable information to preserve the anonymous review process.

Enter via Submittable or mail your materials to: The MacGuffin • Attn: Poet Hunt 30 • 18600 Haggerty Road • Livonia, MI 48152.

See the complete rules.

Deadline: July 15, 2025

The annual Rattle Poetry Prize celebrates its 20th year with a 1st prize of $15,000 for a single poem. Ten finalists will also receive $500 each and publication, and be eligible for the $5,000 Readers' Choice Award, to be selected by subscriber and entrant vote. All of these poems will be published in the winter issue of the magazine.

With the winners judged in an anonymized review by the editors to ensure a fair and consistent selection, an entry fee that is simply a one-year subscription to the magazine—and a large Readers' Choice Award to be chosen by the writers themselves—we've designed the Rattle Poetry Prize to be one of the most inspiring contests around.

Past winners have included a retired teacher, a lawyer, and several students. It's fair, it's friendly, and you win a print subscription to Rattle even if you don't win.

We accept entries online via Submittable. See Rattle's website for the complete guidelines and to read all of the past winners.

Please enjoy this finalist poem by Stephen Allen, published in Rattle #86, Winter 2024:

The Sadness of Morning Glories Out of Season

Why do their wilted vines still cling to walls,
to porch supports, to trellises? So dry
and desiccated, it seems that they should fall
back in the dirt. The seasons slide on by,

winter to spring, and the tattered flags
of leaves and empty sepals hold their own,
until some human intervention drags
them down or brand-new growth from seeds self-sown

begins its reign. But this is a poem about grief,
the grief of things that hold on past their time,
as if all times were well defined. The sleep
of flowers produces wistfulness that climbs

around the spine and twists into the mind,
usurping thoughts and leaving ghosts behind.

Some contests are best suited to writers at the early stages of their careers. Others are better for writers with numerous prizes and publications to their credit. Here is this month's selection of Spotlight Contests for your consideration:

Emerging Writers
Speculative Literature Foundation Older Writers Grant. The Speculative Literature Foundation will award one grant of $1,000 for unpublished writing samples (poetry, drama, fiction, or nonfiction) by writers aged 50+ who are just starting to write professionally. Must be received by May 31. Don't enter before May 1.

Intermediate Writers
Rabbi Sacks Book Prize. The Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks-Herenstein Center for Values and Leadership at Yeshiva University will award $10,000 for a recently or about-to-be published nonfiction book that contributes significantly to the arena of modern Jewish thought and heightens awareness of issues pertaining to the intersection of faith and modernity. Book must have a copyright in the current calendar year. Themes may include Jewish thought and philosophy, ethics, Jewish history, Jewish education, Jewish identity, contemporary Jewish practice and sociology, Jewish peoplehood, Israel from a religious perspective, or antisemitism. All manuscripts should be submitted by the publisher as both a Word document and a PDF file. Must be received by May 1.

Advanced Writers
Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant. The Whiting Foundation will award up to ten grants of $40,000 each for US writers completing creative nonfiction books (e.g., biography, memoir, history, cultural or political reportage, science, philosophy, criticism, graphic nonfiction, personal essays, etc.) that are currently under contract with US, UK, or Canadian publishers. Application must include a letter of support from the book's publisher or editor. Must be received by April 23.

See more Spotlight Contests for emerging, intermediate, and advanced writers within The Best Free Literary Contests database.

Winning Writers finds open submission calls and free contests in a variety of sources, including Erika Dreifus' Practicing Writer newsletter, FundsforWriters, Erica Verrillo's blog, Authors Publish, Lit Mag News Roundup, Poets & Writers, The Writer, Duotrope, Submittable, and literary journals' own newsletters and announcements.

• Boudin: "Immigration and Displacement" Issue
(poetry, fiction, essays, artwork on these themes - April 25)

• Action, Spectacle
(poetry, short fiction, essays, interviews, reviews, artwork, comics - April 30)

• Voices of Lincoln Poetry Contest
(poems on selected themes in adult and youth categories - July 16)

• Rattle: "Tribute to Rebels" Issue
(poetry by authors with unusual beliefs or career paths - October 15)

This month, editor Jendi Reiter highlights selected entries from past Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contests. This year's deadline is May 1. Learn more about the contest.

"JAVA JAYA"
by Tanushree Baidya
Honorable Mention
2018 Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest

"IN A TRADITIONAL CONFESSIONAL"
by Hapuya Ononime
Honorable Mention
2018 Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest

"SHELTER FOR MEMORY"
by Liza Stewart
Honorable Mention
2019 Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest

"THE BRIDGE OF ETERNAL HAPPINESS"
by Debayani Kar
Honorable Mention
2019 Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest

Julian Peters is hard at work illustrating "Giacomo Joyce" by James Joyce. Wikipedia describes it as "a free-form love poem that tracks the waxing and waning of Joyce's infatuation with one of his students in Trieste." We can't wait to see the whole thing!

 

April Links Roundup: A Cruel, Poetic Month
The same absurd positivity that puts reclusive Emily Dickinson's face on tote bags across America has designated April for celebrating poetry, based on T.S. Eliot's decidedly un-celebratory opening to The Waste Land, "April is the cruelest month…" Old Tom was onto something, because the reawakening to life is painful when each day brings news of society's disintegration, alongside forsythia buds and birdsong.

Nevertheless, we go on.
[read more]

Jendi Reiter is the editor of Winning Writers. Visit their website.