Palette Poetry invites innovative work from emerging poets for The 2024 Rising Poet Prize. This contest is open to poets who have not yet published a full-length collection at the time of submission. We look forward to celebrating new and exciting work, so please send us your best poems. The first-place winning poet will be awarded $3,000, publication, and an interview in Palette Poetry. The second-place and third-place winners will receive $300 and $200, respectively, as well as publication. The top ten finalists will be selected by Palette editors, and Guest Judge Morgan Parker will choose the three winners from among the ten finalists. 

Morgan Parker is the author of five books, most recently the essay collection, You Get What You Pay For. Previous titles include Who Put This Song On?, a young adult novel; and the poetry collections Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Parker is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and has been hailed by The New York Times as “a dynamic craftsperson” of “considerable consequence to American poetry.” She lives in Los Angeles with her dog, Shirley.

Submission Guidelines: Please read carefully!

• For this prize, we are only accepting unpublished work from new and emerging poets: poets without a full-length collection published at the time of submission. Poets with no publication history are especially encouraged to submit. Poets with only chapbooks published are also eligible. Poets with self-published full-length collections, however, are ineligible.
• Submissions are open internationally, to any poet writing in English—inclusion of other languages is welcome, as long as the poem is largely written in English.
• DO NOT INCLUDE your name or identifying information in the document OR submission title box. 
• We are only accepting unpublished work. If your poem has been published elsewhere, even on a blog or on social media, it is not eligible.
• We accept simultaneous submissions—just please send us a note if your work is accepted for publication elsewhere.
• Your submission must be no more than three poems and under ten pages. Please submit all your poems in ONE document. Please begin each poem on a new page and include each poem's individual title.
• We do accept multiple submissions (of one to three poems apiece), but each submission will include the $20 reading fee.
• Please include a brief cover letter in the cover letter box with your publication history, if any. This is where you can include your name and/or bio! If you select the editorial feedback option, this cover letter is also where you can name which poem you’d like feedback on. To safeguard our reading staff, please include content warnings in the cover letter, if applicable, as well.
• Review our FAQ page for frequently asked questions.
• NOTE: If after submitting you notice an error in your submission, please message us rather than withdrawing and resubmitting your submission. We can open it to editing once so you can correct the error.
• Palette Poetry does not accept AI-produced work.
• Contest closes September 22, 2024. Submitters will be notified of their submission status 8-12 weeks after the contest closing date.

Included Unique Opportunities and Discounts

As a thank you for your support for Palette, we’d like to offer a 10% off discount code on a writing class from The Writing Salon. Find a class and use the code included in the confirmation message at checkout.

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 the submission, including suggestions for future submissions. The three-letter option costs $149 and will provide you with six pages of detailed and actionable feedback on a poem of your choice from the submission, including suggestions for future submissions, from three separate guest editors. Our guest editors are paid a significant portion of the fee and are all incredibly astute poets.

Palette Poetry invites innovative work from emerging poets for The 2024 Rising Poet Prize. This contest is open to poets who have not yet published a full-length collection at the time of submission. We look forward to celebrating new and exciting work, so please send us your best poems. The first-place winning poet will be awarded $3,000, publication, and an interview in Palette Poetry. The second-place and third-place winners will receive $300 and $200, respectively, as well as publication. The top ten finalists will be selected by Palette editors, and Guest Judge Morgan Parker will choose the three winners from among the ten finalists. 

Morgan Parker is the author of five books, most recently the essay collection, You Get What You Pay For. Previous titles include Who Put This Song On?, a young adult novel; and the poetry collections Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Parker is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and has been hailed by The New York Times as “a dynamic craftsperson” of “considerable consequence to American poetry.” She lives in Los Angeles with her dog, Shirley.

Submission Guidelines: Please read carefully!

• For this prize, we are only accepting unpublished work from new and emerging poets: poets without a full-length collection published at the time of submission. Poets with no publication history are especially encouraged to submit. Poets with only chapbooks published are also eligible. Poets with self-published full-length collections, however, are ineligible.
• Submissions are open internationally, to any poet writing in English—inclusion of other languages is welcome, as long as the poem is largely written in English.
• DO NOT INCLUDE your name or identifying information in the document OR submission title box. 
• We are only accepting unpublished work. If your poem has been published elsewhere, even on a blog or on social media, it is not eligible.
• We accept simultaneous submissions—just please send us a note if your work is accepted for publication elsewhere.
• Your submission must be no more than three poems and under ten pages. Please submit all your poems in ONE document. Please begin each poem on a new page and include each poem's individual title.
• We do accept multiple submissions (of one to three poems apiece), but each submission will include the $20 reading fee.
• Please include a brief cover letter in the cover letter box with your publication history, if any. This is where you can include your name and/or bio! If you select the editorial feedback option, this cover letter is also where you can name which poem you’d like feedback on. To safeguard our reading staff, please include content warnings in the cover letter, if applicable, as well.
• Review our FAQ page for frequently asked questions.
• NOTE: If after submitting you notice an error in your submission, please message us rather than withdrawing and resubmitting your submission. We can open it to editing once so you can correct the error.
• Palette Poetry does not accept AI-produced work.
• Contest closes September 22, 2024. Submitters will be notified of their submission status 8-12 weeks after the contest closing date.

Included Unique Opportunities and Discounts

As a thank you for your support for Palette, we’d like to offer a 10% off discount code on a writing class from The Writing Salon. Find a class and use the code included in the confirmation message at checkout.

Dear poets,

We are halfway through the year, and it’s time to examine our artistic practices and writing goals. While the craft of poetry and the field of publication can seem opaque, we would like to invite you into our Summer Async Studio, which aims to educate and provide new inspiration and direction for your poetry.

This summer, I am excited to share with you seven mini lectures on poetry craft topics, which were created by Palette Poetry editors and other talented poets in our community. Our intention is to give you accessible and rewatchable advice to aid you in developing your poetry. You will explore strategic line breaks, revision strategies for poetry, putting together a chapbook, and more. 

You will also receive direct feedback on your poetry. After a close read of your submission, our guest editors will send you an editorial letter full of observations, next steps, and possible paths to publication. 

This summer, we invite you to work closely with the Palette team to shift your poetry practice into its best shape yet.

Write on!

Marcella Haddad

Editor in Chief

our partner instructors:

A combination of individual feedback and expert instruction, the Async Studio is our latest endeavor to support writers who want to make progress in their craft. We’re thrilled to partner with some wonderful poets to launch this project, with short craft videos from:

Joanna Acevedo (she/they) is a writer, educator, and editor from New York City. She is the author of four books and chapbooks, including Unsaid Things (Flexible Press, 2021), List of Demands (Bottlecap Press, 2022), and Outtakes (WTAW Press, 2023). Her work can be found across the web and in print, including or forthcoming in Jelly Bucket, Hobart, and The Adroit Journal. She is a guest editor at Palette Poetry, Frontier Poetry, The Masters Review, and CRAFT, and a regular contributor to The Masters Review blog, in addition to acting as assistant fiction editor at Foglifter Journal. Currently, she is working as the Sales Rep & Events Coordinator at Black Lawrence Press. She received her MFA in fiction from New York University in 2021, teaches writing, interviewing and communication skills for both nonprofits and corporations, and is supported by Creatives Rebuild New York: Guaranteed Income for Artists.

Flower Conroy is an LGBTQIA+ writer, a National Endowment for the Arts and a MacDowell fellow, and a former Key West poet laureate. She is the author of Snake Breaking Medusa Disorder (NFSPS Press, 2019), winner of the Stevens Manuscript Competition; A Sentimental Hairpin (Tolsun Books, 2021), listed as a November 2021 best seller by Small Press Distribution; and Greenest Grass (WSU Press, 2023), winner of the Blue Lynx Press Prize. Conroy’s work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Community of Writers, and the Key West Literary Seminar. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and the Pushcart Prize. Conroy has exhibited her poetry and assemblage art at The Studios of Key West.

Rebecca Evans writes the difficult, the heart-full, the guidebooks for survivors. Her debut memoir in verse, Tangled by Blood, bridges motherhood and betrayal, untangling wounds and restorying what it means to be a mother. She’s a memoirist, essayist, and poet, co-hosting Radio Boise’s Writer to Writer on Stray Theater. She's earned two MFAs, one in creative nonfiction, the other in poetry, University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. She’s co-edited an anthology of poems, when there are nine, a tribute to the life and achievements of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Moon Tide Press, 2022). You can find her poems and essays in fine journals like Narratively, The Rumpus, Hypertext Magazine, War, Literature & the Arts, and The Limberlost Review.

Marcella Haddad (she/her) is the author of Sidewinder (Gateway Literary Press) and Witch House (Ghost City Press). Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in Apparition Lit, Okay Donkey, Variant Literature, and others. She received her MFA from University of Massachusetts Amherst and was a Tin House YA Scholar. She is the editor in chief of Palette Poetry and the managing editor of Moonflake Press. She teaches at Grubstreet and Clarion West. You can find her in a tree or at marcellaphaddad.com

Laura S. Marshall (she/they) is a poet, educator, and former linguist who lives outside Albany, New York. Their work appears in South Dakota Review, Bennington Review, The Dodge, trampset, juked, Okay Donkey, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best Microfiction, as well as longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions. They received an MFA in poetry from University of Massachusetts Amherst, and have served as an editor for jubilat.

Joshua Roark is the founder of Palette Poetry. He also serves as poetry and pedagogy faculty at Antioch University Los Angeles’ MFA program, as well as the founder and director of PocketMFA. He lives with his wife in Los Angeles, where they’re always at work making stories, poems, novels, or films.

Michael Zendejas Michael Zendejas is the Senior Hybrid Acquisitions Editor for Abode Press. He received a Fiction MFA at University of Massachusetts Amherst and runs the film blog, The Chicano Film Shelf. An inaugural recipient of the Rose Fellowship, a Juniper Fellow, a 2022 winner of the James W. Foley Memorial Prize, and a member of the inaugural cohort of the Emerging Writers Fellowship, he consults and teaches classes on fiction, poetry and screenwriting via GrubStreet. His work is featured or forthcoming in: Stanchion, North American Review, Latin@ Literatures, and elsewhere.

participants receive:

• a 2-3 page feedback letter from an editor with specific suggestions and developmental edits, as well as suggestions for places of submission;
• access to 7 mini master class lessons (each under 15 minutes) from our guest instructors: “Repetitions” by Joanna Acevedo, “Deepening Emotional Subtext” by Flower Conroy, “Ghazal” by Rebecca Evans, “Accessibility vs. Mystery” by Marcella Haddad, “Revision Strategies” by Laura S. Marshall, “Putting a Chapbook Together” by Joshua Roark, and “Line Breaks” by Michael Zendejas;
• and one free submission in a forthcoming Palette Poetry contest.

Feedback letters will be received no later than September. Early submissions may yield earlier feedback.

submission guidelines:

• Please submit one poem if you are requesting a single letter ($99), and up to three poems if you are selecting the three-letter option ($199). All submissions must be under 10 pages.
• Your poems must be submitted via Submittable, our online submissions manager, between July 1, 2024, and July 31, 2024.
• Multiple submissions are permitted, but each must be submitted separately with a new fee.
• Submissions are open internationally to any poet writing in English. However, some code-switching/meshing is warmly welcomed.
• Please include a brief cover letter that shares your bio, any applicable content warnings, as well as ideas or questions you’d like to address with your editor.
• Review our FAQ page for more information.
• If you haven’t already, please verify your email address with submittable for more consistent communication.
• We are not seeking AI-generated work at this time. Please submit original work.