The 2026 Rising Poet Prize—$3,500 Awarded

Back by popular demand, the Rising Poet Prize is returning this spring! Palette Poetry invites all poets who have not yet published a full-length collection to send us your best poems. We are looking to celebrate new and exciting work, and we hope to shine a light on up-and-coming poets. 

The judge for this prize is Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, who asks submitters to consider the following:

“When you sit at your desk to create, what are the memories, images, and moments that rise to the front? What are the words, people, places that insist on being brought to the light? In our current chaotic state, I'm hungry, like many of us, for clarity, craft, complexity, and above all else, love. As Audre Lorde writes in ‘Litany for Survival,’ ‘when we are silent / we are still afraid // So it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive.’ 

“I'm interested in reading what must be spoken and expressed through sound, color, language, line, and more. Carolyn Forché writes in the anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, ‘Poetry, in order to be the witness of lived experience, of breath, will have to resort to a language more suitable to the time… Extremity, as we have seen, demands new forms or alters older modes of poetic thought. It also breaks forms and creates forms from these breaks.’ We are in a moment of extremes that is pushing many to their breaking point, but we as artists have the privilege to take that pressure and mold something new. What newness are you knitting from this moment? I'd love to see!”

—Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

Submissions are open from February 9, 2026 – April 12, 2026. Palette’s editors will choose the ten finalists and any honorable mentions that warrant extra attention. Our judge will then select the winner and runners-up for publication. The winner will be awarded $3,000, publication, and a brief interview in Palette Poetry. Second and third place will receive $300 and $200, respectively, as well as publication. Finalists may also be considered for publication in our Featured Poetry category.

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the daughter of Mexican immigrants and the author of Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites (Mouthfeel Press) and Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications). A former Steinbeck Fellow and Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner, she’s received residencies from Hedgebrook, Ragdale, Yefe Nof, Jentel, and National Parks Arts Foundation in partnership with Gettysburg National Military Park and Poetry Foundation. Bermejo's poetry and essays can be found at Acentos Review, Huizache, LA Review of Books, The Offing, [PANK], Santa Fe Writers Project, and other journals. Her poem “Battlegrounds” is featured in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, On Being’s Poetry Unbound, and Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World (W.W. Norton). Her most recent essay on the writing life, “How to Write a Love Poem,” can be found at Cleaver Magazine. She is the director of Women Who Submit and teaches poetry and creative writing with Antioch University, MFA and UCLA Extension. Inspired by her Chicana identity, she works to cultivate love and comfort in chaotic times.

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. At this time, Palette does not accept translated work unless you are also the author of the original poem.
• 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 must include the $20 reading fee.
• Writers from historically marginalized groups are invited to submit for free until we reach the fifty free entries budgeted for this particular contest. 
• We accept simultaneous submissions—just please send us a note if your work is accepted for publication elsewhere.
• 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.
• DO NOT INCLUDE your name or identifying information in the document OR submission title box.
• Please include a brief cover letter in the cover letter box with your publication history, if any. This text box 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 April 12, 2026. Submitters will be notified of their submission status within twelve weeks of the contest closing date.

Discount for Submitters

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.