The 2026 Nature Poetry Prize—$3,500 Awarded—Free Entry for BIPOC and Historically Marginalized Poets

As summer crawls forth, we invite you to step outside and immerse yourself (and your writing) in nature! For our second year of the Nature Poetry Prize, we are ecstatic to have Kimiko Hahn serve as our judge. Please join us in celebrating the natural world through poems contemplating our relationship to flora and fauna, on how words can bloom from soil, and about the melody you hear whispered in the winds. Whether your connection to nature is positive, antagonistic, or dependent—we look forward to reading it all! 

For more inspiration on the subject, here is some advice from our guest judge: 

“If you think about it, Nature writing can encompass any subject whether an object from the forest or sea or observing the wonders of the body; whether celebrating discovery, or mourning loss. I am interested in seeing how inventive a writer can be in finding Nature. Take out a magnifying glass and really look at a cocoon. What about a plastic bag caught in a tree? Make your language work hard to bring your images to light. And remember, the five kinds of images in poetry connect to our five senses and not just the visual. I want to read a poem that draws me into the experience of Nature.”

—Kimiko Hahn

Submissions are open from April 14, 2026 – June 14, 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 two 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.

Kimiko Hahn is author of eleven collections of poetry, including The Ghost Forest: New & Selected Poems (W.W. Norton, 2024) which plays with given forms while creating new ones, and, in doing so, honors past writers. Previous books Foreign Bodies, Toxic Flora, and Brain Fever were prompted by fields of science; The Narrow Road to the Interior takes title and forms from Basho’s famous journals. Reflecting her interest in Japanese poetics, her essay on the zuihitsu was published in the American Poetry Review.

In 2023, Kimiko was named a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and received The Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Lifetime Achievement Award. Additional honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize, Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, American Book Award, and NEA Fellowships. In her service to the field, she enjoys promoting chapbooks and has created a chapbook archive at the Queens College Library. She will serve as New York State Poet from 2025-2027. Hahn is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York.

Submission Guidelines: Please read carefully!

• 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 June 14, 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.