Poetry Contests: 4 Reasons To Enter, and How To Choose Them
This article is for: Beginning and Intermediate Poets
One basic choice you face when making submissions is:
Should I send my poems to journals and magazines, or to contests and competitions?
On the face of it, sending to contests and competitions may seem a less good idea than submitting to journals.
Competition submissions are almost always more expensive than magazine submissions. Many magazines and journals allow you to submit for free, and most reading fees are rarely more than $3. Competitions, on the other hand, may cost $10, $15, or more, even for a single poem.
Moreover, in most cases you have worse odds of winning a competition than getting published in a magazine. Magazines publish dozens of poems per issue, whereas competitions select many fewer prizewinners (even when you count the runners-up mentions)
Based on these facts, you might decide to create a submission strategy that focuses on magazine and journal submissions alone.
Yet despite all this, it is still an excellent idea to submit to contests as well.
And in this article, I’m going to explain the main benefits that make contests and competitions worth it, as well as giving some tips on types of contest, to help you choose wisely.
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Four reasons why poetry contests are worth it
If competitions and contests are more expensive than journal submissions, and you’re less likely to win, why enter them at all?
Because winning a contest can give you a lot more than a journal or magazine publication.
(And actually you can still get a lot of the benefits of a contest by coming second, or simply being shortlisted. So though I'll refer to "winning," I also mean coming second, third, getting shortlisted, or anything else that puts you near the top of the pile.)
Here are the four main things I think you get from winning a contest, that you won’t get as much of from a journal.
Reason 1: Winning a competition looks great on your "poetry CV"
As you may know, a lot of the poetry world is based on something called your “poetry reputation”—that is, how good other people think your poetry is.
It is of course impossible to try to measure this precisely, but there is a kind of shortcut for assessing this: how many places you've been published in, and how "good" those places are.
This is why submitting poems is an essential part of being a serious poet. The more places you get published, and the more prestigious they are, the more reputation you gain—and the more likely that someone will eventually want to publish your book!
That's why magazine and journal submissions are always a good idea—even for beginners.
But winning a contest can give you more “poetry points” than being accepted in a lot of journals.
Because it's harder to win a competition, it means your poem stood out more from the other submissions—which means you get more prestige.
Therefore, although you won’t win contests as often you get poems accepted by magazines, you only need one or two big wins to move yourself up the reputation rankings very nicely!
I can vouch personally for the importance and value of competition success. My wins in the Hampshire Poet competition in 2012 and the Poets & Writers Maureen Egan Award in 2017 were both hugely important to developing my credibility as a poet in the UK and the US respectively, and making new connections. Being shortlisted for a really big UK poetry prize in 2013, the Bridport prize, didn't hurt any either!
This by itself is enough reason to enter contests—but there are more too….
Reason 2: Winning a competition may open doors for you.
There is likely to be some publicity around the competition results, which means you will get known as a poet, and as a good poet, to more people—and you never know where that might lead.
In addition, when you're trying to prove to others that you know what you're doing, perhaps because you want to run a workshop or give a reading, having a competition win on your CV can be highly persuasive—especially for non-poets, who may never have heard even of top magazines like Magma or Ploughshares, but who will realize that the word "Prize" or "Competition" means you won something good!
Reason 3: Winning competitions can make valuable connections for you.
A contest always has people involved in it—the administrators, the sponsoring organization, the judge.
Winning the contest means you immediately become special to all of these people!
So, for a short time, you will have some interactions with them, which might help you out in other ways later on.
Moreover, you may have the chance to meet (perhaps virtually, these days) other poets who were prizewinners or shortlisted. And there's also likely to be some kind of celebratory reading.
All these things may create community, helpmates, and opportunities for you in the poetry world.
Reason 4: Winning a competition can boost your confidence.
If someone else thinks that your poem was the best out of 100 other poems, or 1,000, or 10,000, that's a great affirmation of your effort and skill!
Yes, journal publications also do this, especially if it’s a really big, important journal. But winning competitions has extra razzmatazz, and so may mean more to you.
Bonus 5th reason: Competitions give you motivation to write
Aside from the benefits of winning, this is one big benefit of just entering.
Contests come with these superbly helpful things called "deadlines"—and, as a wise person once said, "Writer + Deadline = Writing." Although actually, you don't have to create new poems to get this benefit: even if you send pieces you've already completed, you still have new motivation to revisit them and see if they need a polish.
All of these reasons are why I think it's well worth including competitions as a core part of your how you send your poems out into the world.
You may not win anything for a while, but when you eventually do, it will be worth it.
How can you choose which competitions to enter?
First, make sure you're aware of the range of competition types.
As you probably know, at any one time there are oodles of places who want to read your poem and potentially give you a prize for it. For example, literary listings website Duotrope contains details of no fewer than 708 poetry competitions across the world!
But all these competitions are NOT created equal. Some are huge, some are tiny, and most are somewhere in-between.
So the first part of a good competition submission strategy is to be aware of these differences, and use them to your advantage.
Huge Competitions
Examples here are the Rattle Poetry Prize, which has a colossal first prize of $15,000, and the UK's National Poetry Competition, which gives away £5,000 to its winner.
This type of competition, with its gigantic prize money and prestige, attracts an equally gigantic number of entries, including from many top published poets—because after all, who doesn't want an extra $15,000?!
And this means that they're extremely difficult to win.
Probably not as bad as your chance of winning the Lottery, but close!
So if you only entered competitions like these, I'd say you were not giving yourself a fair chance.
Having said that, someone has to win them—and it's not always a famous published poet who does so! So on the whole, I think it is worth entering a couple of these every year, just in case—but you should put your main efforts into competitions that are smaller.
Medium-sized competitions
In this category, I'm thinking of contests that offer anything from a few hundred to the low thousands as prize money. This might be from Frontier Poetry's Industry Prize ($3,000) to the Edward Thomas Fellowship Competition (£150).
These competitions don't attract as many entries as the mega competitions, and of course the number of entries declines as the prize money goes down! So you have a much better chance of winning one of these.
So I would say these mid-range contests should be the main focus of your competition strategy.
When you're starting out, start with the ones where the prize is below a thousand.
As you get more confident, and hopefully rack up a win or two in the smaller competitions, let your sights climb higher up the scale, and start entering bigger ones.
Specialized competitions
These are a sub-type of the Medium contests: ones that offer a reasonable level of prize, but which place some kind of limit on the kind of poems that can be entered.
Some examples of the kinds of limit I mean are:
Poems written in traditional form
Poems about particular subject matter e.g. motherhood, nature, sex
Poems written by poets from a certain demographic (female, older, LGBTQ) or region
These competitions are extremely well worth looking out for. The constraints mean that the number of entries is bound to be lower, but they can still be quite important and useful ones to win.
For example, I have twice won contests based on where I lived at the time: Hampshire Poet Laureate (UK) in 2012, and the Maureen Egan Award (USA) in 2017. These both helped my reputation no end.
So if you see a competition like this that might apply to you, I strongly recommend entering it.
Tiny competitions
Here I'm thinking of very small contests, often held by local writers' groups, which probably offer nothing but glory to the winner!
These are a fun way to start your poetry contest career, and may be helpful if you are a beginner or feel under confident. But—to be honest—they carry little or no weight in the wider poetry world. By all means enter one if it connects with an organization that you belong to or value, but I would not say that these should be a big part of your plans for a long-term poetry career.
In summary, here is the strategy I recommend for how to choose competitions to enter:
Enter a couple of the big ones ever year because—who knows?—you might get lucky.
Look out for specialized competitions that apply to you, and enter as many as you can afford!
Make mid-sized competitions the bulk of your entries, starting with low-prize ones, and moving up as you win one or two.
Now, very briefly, two other important questions:
How many competitions to enter?
This really depends on your purse. Almost all competitions cost money, so you don't want to bankrupt yourself.
A simple answer is to set yourself an annual or monthly budget for competitions, and enter as many as that figure allows.
Where to find competitions?
There are some useful listings website for this:
Duotrope (global, small subscription required)
Poets & Writers (USA).
But do also keep an eye out for ones you see mentioned or advertised in magazines, at readings, through presses—anywhere you're connected with the poetry world.
Next Steps: Choose 3 Contests
No time like the present! Before you leave this page, find three poetry competitions you can submit to—two now, and one in the future.
Use the links above to find one big poetry contest that’s open now.
By “big,” I mean prize money over $1,000.
For example, if you’re reading this between November and May, you could try the Bridport Prize—£5,000 to the winner!Search the web for a smaller contest that’s also open now.
For this one, try looking for prize money of $500 or below. An example might be the Gulf Coast Writer’s Contest.For each of these two contests, choose one of your best unpublished poems—and submit it!
Find another poetry contest that you like the look of, but which is currently closed.
Make a note of the date this contest opens and closes.Set yourself a goal of writing 3 poems that you could send to this contest.
Then you’ll be using the deadline as an incentive to create new work.
Once you’ve started submitting to competitions, make it a part of what you do each month.
And I hope you get some glory from it soon!
