We are looking for poetry that pushes language forward, for poets and poems that strive to place themselves at the edge of what language can do.

Work by new and underrepresented voices is one of our priorities in publication. We take our role as a mediating platform between poet and world seriously and strive to use this role as fairly and justly as we can. 

The frontier land of poetry, that distant landscape where all voices can be heard clearly and in abundance, where poets from all contexts feel empowered to step into their writing—we seek that place, and hope to plant ourselves in its beauty.



Ultra-competitive magazines with one to two percent acceptance rates. They are competitive. They are choosy. But who doesn't love a challenge?

The 1% Club (Good Fuckin' Luck)

The ultimate ranking of the world's liveliest indie literary magazines, curated by author and editor Charlie Fish. These are the passion projects; the kaleidoscopic cutting edge.

FISH List of Lively Indie Literary Magazines 2026

Identifies publications that put forward outstanding online work for this respected digital anthology established in 2006.

Literary Magazines That Nominate for Best of the Net

These magazines have the fastest response times, so you won't be left hanging for months. No more endless waiting. Just, you know, regular waiting.

Literary Magazines with the Fastest Response Times

All-time most competitive literary magazines. Getting published in these is a significant achievement for any writer.

Most Competitive Literary Magazines of All Time

Discover the all-time most competitive poetry literary magazines. These legendary publications are where only the best poetry gets through.

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Most Popular Literary Magazines of All Time

Discover the all-time most popular poetry literary magazines. These outlets have maintained a significant presence in the world of poetry.

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Discover the all-time most submitted-to poetry literary magazines. These publications have consistently attracted a high volume of poetry submissions.

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Online journals that specifically champion poetry for Best of the Net consideration.

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Frontier Poetry

The 2025 (Not) in Love Haiku Challenge
"Stronger than lover's love is lover's hate. Incurable, in each, the wounds they make.”
― Euripides, Medea
We understand that the Valentine’s Day season—the candy hearts, Hallmark quotes, and the flood of partners to the flower section to buy overpriced red roses—can be taxing. Some feel less Nicholas Sparks-esque and more in the realm of a Stephen King horror. A dedicated time to appreciate love is great but the near-constant pressure to find or express love can sometimes dredge up old flings we'd rather forget-- that we find sickening upon reflection. Here at Frontier Poetry, we’re looking for something a little more bitter, vengeful and potent
In that spirit, Frontier Poetry is thrilled to announce the 2025 (Not) in Love Haiku Challenge.
The challenge will open on February 5th, 2026, and close on February 15th, 2026.
For this ten-day challenge, Frontier seeks poetry written as Haiku—a Japanese poem of seventeen syllables, in three lines of five, seven, and five. While traditional haiku typically engages the natural world, we’re looking for risk taking, experimentation, and surprise as you work in this classic form. Send us poems that would provoke Saint Valentine. We’re looking for poetry that explores the people, places, and things you have a love-hate relationship with. Consider this a condensed version of your lengthier diss track; we can't wait to listen!
Explore examples of haiku poems below:
Untitled/無題 | The Poetry Foundation
Malu Cycles/瑪璐循環 | Poetry Foundation
David Trinidad (Basho) | Unwoven Literary Mag
[goes out comes back] | The Poetry Foundation
[all the time I pray to Buddha] | The Poetry Foundation
Guidelines:
The challenge will open on February 5th, 2026, and close on February 15th, 2026.
Three winners will be chosen by our editorial staff. The first-place winner will receive $500, with the second- and third-place winners receiving $200 and $100, respectively. All winners will be published on Frontier’s website.
For this challenge, submissions are open to new and emerging poets with no more than one full-length work of poetry published or forthcoming at the time of submission.
Do not include any identifying information in the body of your document.
Send up to three poems per submission. Simply, all three poems must be haiku poems.
Please submit previously unpublished poems only.
We welcome simultaneous submissions, but please notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
You may submit multiple times, but each submission (of up to three haiku poems) requires a separate $10 fee.
Please provide a brief cover letter that includes a short, third-person bio with your publication history, as well as any applicable content warnings to safeguard our reading staff.
Submissions are open internationally, to any poet writing primarily in English. Code-switching/meshing is warmly welcomed.
If you haven’t already, please verify your email address with Submittable for more consistent communication.
We will not accept AI-generated or -assisted work for this challenge. Such work will be automatically disqualified.
If you have any questions, please visit our FAQ page first. If you don’t find the answer to your question, you can send an email to contact (at) frontierpoetry (dot) com.
Editorial Feedback Option:
This option costs $59 and will provide you with two pages of detailed and actionable feedback on one poem in 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 note, the time frame for editorial letters is eight to twelve weeks from the close of the challenge.

Frontier Poetry - 2026 (Not) in Love Haiku Challenge

New Voices: Fast Response for BIPOC Writers

Submissions for our New Voices poetry category are open year round to any new and emerging poet who has not published more than one full-length collection of poetry. New Voices are published online only and will feature a number of poems from new authors each month.

New Voices: Frontier Poetry - Free

We love the intensity and simplicity of a good chapbook, and we're excited that this Chapbook Prize will offer the opportunity for the winning poet to publish and distribute their little book to thousands of readers for free. Open to all poets.

Debut Chapbook Prize

2026 Hurt & Healing Prize
In the dawn of the new year, Frontier Poetry is excited to announce the 2026 Hurt & Healing Prize.
To harbor life in ourselves is an act of courage. Milenka Aurelio once said that “[our] bodies hold memories, trauma, joy, and potential all at once.” We carry the whole of our histories—both personal and collective—within our bodies. What we carry is not only tranquility, passion, or joy; we also move forward holding it all, and learning to live in a kind of awkward, strange, contradictory, and miraculous harmony with pain. The clumsiness and triumph of this journey is what we call healing—what inspires hope.
With the 2026 Hurt & Healing Prize, we invite you to recall your journeys through the entanglement of pain and restoration. Frontier Poetry seeks poems that explore grief, loss, heartache, and the imperfect path taken to reach the ongoing work of healing. Whether your poetry is authored in the midst of anguish or written from the other side, we welcome work that is transparent, honest, and poetically resonant.
Frontier Poetry welcomes all interpretations of both hurting and healing. We proudly encourage submissions from poets of all identities, cultures, and backgrounds.
Guest judge Gbenga Adesina will select the winners. The first-place winner will receive $3,000 and publication. The second- and third-place winners will receive $300 and $200, respectively, along with publication. All finalists will be considered for paid publication in New Voices.
The contest opens January 5th and closes March 8th, 2026.
Further reading for inspiration can be found here:
OBIT | The Poetry Foundation
Siri as Mother | Academy of American Poets 
UPON RECEIVING THE NEWS LOOKING OUT THE KITCHEN WINDOW | Frontier Poetry 
I begin the day thinking | Academy of American Poets 
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.  
About Our Judge:
Gbenga Adesina, Nigerian poet and essayist, received his MFA from New York University where he was a Goldwater Poetry Fellowship and was mentored by Yusef Komunyakaa. He has received support from the Poets House, New York; Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown; Colgate University’s Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship; Folger Shakespeare’s Library, Washington DC; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Harlem; and Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University. His work has been published in the Paris Review, Harvard Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, Guernica, Narrative, The Best American Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere, and has been translated into six languages. He is the cofounder and editor of A Long House, a journal of diasporic art, thought, and literature. He received a PhD with emphasis on Poetry from Florida State University and is the inaugural Mellon Foundation Post-doctoral Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic Poetry at the Furious Flower Poetry Center, James Madison University. His debut book of poems, Death Does Not End At The Sea, won the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry. 
What our judge is looking for:
I'm looking for surprise and an awareness of language as an architectural device. I'm looking for a voice with multiple rooms inside it. I'm looking for an alertness to the world, a sense of history’s music, and how that music lives publicly and privately inside us. I'm interested in the irreducible fire of a visionary mind that conceives of language as a dance. I want to be compelled by how a poem conceives of hurt and healing, how it subverts our ideas and notions of what it means to hurt or heal, how it collapses and ruptures our neat partitions of these ideas, how it transforms words, experiences, and realities. I want the emotional clarity of a Nina Simone song, the gravitas of a Rap Ellison sentence, and the levitation and grace of a hymn. Actually, scratch all the above, I’m looking for you to, as the kids say, put me in my feels.
Guidelines:

  Submissions are open to new and emerging writers (for this contest, we define this as poets with no more than one full-length work of poetry published or forthcoming at the time of submission).
  Send up to three poems per submission, for a total of no more than five pages. We have no aesthetic or formal requirements and consider all styles of poetry. Each new submission requires a $20 reading fee.
  As part of our dedication to the pursuit of a more inclusive publishing world, we offer a free submission window for poets from historically marginalized groups (BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, disabled community, et cetera) at the beginning of the contest until our cap of fifty. Submission cap met. 
  Do not include any identifying information in the body of your document.
  Please submit unpublished poems only.
  We welcome simultaneous submissions, but please notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
  You may submit multiple times, but each submission requires a separate $20 fee.
  Please provide a brief cover letter that includes a short, third-person bio with your publication history and any applicable content warnings.
  Submissions are open internationally, to any poet writing in English. Inclusion of other languages is welcome, as long as the poem is primarily written in English.
  Please do not submit work if you have a personal relationship with the judge.
  If you haven’t already, please verify your email address with Submittable for more consistent communication.
  We will not accept AI-generated work for this contest.
  If you have any questions, please visit our FAQ page first. If you don’t find the answer to your question, you can send an email to contact (at) frontierpoetry (dot) com.

 
Editorial Feedback Option:
This option costs $59 and will provide you with two pages of detailed and actionable feedback on a poem of your choice from your packet, 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.

2026 Hurt & Healing Prize // $3500

It can be difficult to write for a themed contest. Some poets may not have an award-worthy poem for every pirate-horror or glassblowing sonnet contest out there. Those who do may still struggle to interpret the nebulous criteria. While themes can provide direction, they also run the risk of an additional publication barrier.
That’s why, once a year, our publication holds a contest with no thematic restrictions—no deciphering niche writing prompts, just an invitation to submit your strongest work.
Frontier Poetry is thrilled to announce our biggest writing contest of the year: the 2026 Frontier OPEN. While we primarily serve as a platform for new and emerging writers, the OPEN is meant to support and elevate the poetry community as a whole. Every year, we look forward to this prize, for which emerging and established poets are considered in equal measure and as a result are often published side by side in Frontier Poetry.
We’re awarding one exceptional poem that demonstrates impact, risk, experimentation, and craft excellence—regardless of theme or subject—with a $5,000 prize.
In addition to the winner, nine finalists will also receive an award of $100 each with publication. The Frontier Poetry editorial team will work together to select winners and finalists for this contest.
Our editorial team can’t wait to read your best work—glassblowing sonnets and pirate-horror poems included.
The contest opens May 11th, 2026, and closes July 12th, 2026.
If you have any questions, please visit our FAQ page. If you don’t find the answer to your question, you can send an email to contact (at ) frontierpoetry (dot) com.
Our editorial commentary costs $12 and will provide you with a few sentences of high level, big picture feedback from one of our astute readers.
The single–letter editorial feedback costs $59 and will provide you with two pages of detailed and actionable feedback by one of our editors on a single poem of your choice from your packet, 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 twelve weeks from the close of the contest to receive your editorial feedback.

Frontier OPEN

To make sense of paradoxes that define human experience, people have erected pathways towards understanding that transcend time. In moments of deep confusion, some may rely on the thrill and expedience of superstition; on the steadfastness of religion; in moments of deep curiosity, others still use the scientific method to gain knowledge. Mythology and fables remain the artist's tool for making sense of the world. As Joseph Campbell states: “I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of [artists], the inspirers of [poets].”
In that vein, Frontier Poetry is excited to announce the 2026 Myths & Fables Prize. We’re seeking poems that address myths or fables with creativity and innovation. We invite classic retellings, holistic reimaginings, and personal mythologizing. Be subversive, challenge audience expectation, and venture to demonstrate the potentialities of language when paired with the power of myth.
Frontier Poetry warmly encourages submissions from poets of all identities, cultural backgrounds, and traditions. We are especially interested in work that explores underrepresented mythologies and stories not often given space in the Western literary canon.
Guest Judge Matthew Olzmann will select the winners.The first-place winner will receive $3,000 and publication. Second- and third-place winners will receive $300 and $200, respectively, along with publication. All finalists will be considered for paid publication in New Voices.
This contest opens July 13th, 2026 and closes September 13th, 2026.
Further reading for inspiration can be found here:
“Circe's Power” by Louise Glück
“The Uncursing of Medusa” by Ola Faleti
“Asian Cowgirl Is Doomed From the Start " by Kimberly Ramos
"God is Narcoleptic Too," by Cheyenne Mann
"When My Preschoolers Ask Me Why I Don't Have Kids" by Allison Norwood
Matthew Olzmann is the author of Constellation Route as well as two previous collections of poetry. His next book An Oral History of the Flat Earth is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2027. A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Olzmann’s poems have appeared in the New York Times, Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prizes, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor at Dartmouth College and also teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Submissions are open to new and emerging writers (for this contest, we define this as poets with no more than one full-length work of poetry published or forthcoming at the time of submission).
Send up to three poems per submission, for a total of no more than five pages.
For this contest, we have no aesthetic or formal requirements and will consider all styles of poetry.
Please submit unpublished poems only. Previously published work will be automatically disqualified.
You may submit multiple times, but each submission requires a separate $20 fee.
We welcome simultaneous submissions, but please notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
As part of our dedication to the pursuit of a more inclusive publishing world, we offer a free submission window for poets from historically marginalized groups at the beginning of the contest. Please note the portal will close when we hit our cap of fifty submissions; there will be no additional waivers granted.
Submissions are open internationally, to any poet writing in English. Inclusion of other languages is welcome, as long as the poem is primarily written in English. Some code-switching/meshing is warmly welcomed.
Please include a brief cover letter that includes a short, third-person bio with your publication history, if applicable. To safeguard our staff, please include any necessary content warnings as well.
Do not include any identifying information in the body of your document.
Work generated by AI will be automatically disqualified.
Please do not submit work if you have a close relationship with Frontier’s editors or the guest judge.
Winners and finalists will be announced in the fall of 2026.
If you have any questions, please visit our FAQ page. If you don’t find the answer to your question, you can send an email to contact (at ) frontierpoetry (dot) com.
The single–letter editorial feedback costs $59 and will provide you with two pages of detailed and actionable feedback by one of our editors on a single poem of your choice from your packet, 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 twelve weeks from the close of the contest to receive your editorial feedback.

Frontier Poetry

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New Voices: Fast Response for BIPOC Writers

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