The Rumpus Poetry Prize (judged by Kaveh Akbar)
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Announcing the Inaugural Rumpus Prize for Poetry
The Rumpus has a long history of championing emerging and established poets, and we're pleased to announce a new way of bringing attention to great poetry.
- $1,000 first-place prize and publication on therumpus.net
- Honorable mention receives $200 and publication
- All entries are eligible for publication in The Rumpus. Those published will be offered the standard contributor payment of $50.
The Rumpus will accept contest submissions from December 5, 2024, through March 2, 2025. Finalists will be contacted in May 2025. Winners will be announced publicly and published by June 2025.
We are honored to have KAVEH AKBAR as our judge for the inaugural Rumpus Prize for Poetry.
Kaveh Akbar's poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf 2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James 2017), in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry 2016). He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine (Penguin Classics 2022). Martyr! (Knopf, 2024), Kaveh’s first novel, was a New York Times bestseller, the 2024 recipient of the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize for Fiction, a 2024 Discover Prize Finalist, and a 2024 National Book Award Finalist.
In 2020 Kaveh was named Poetry Editor of The Nation. The recipient of honors including multiple Pushcart Prizes, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, and the Levis Reading Prize, Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and teaches at the University of Iowa and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson. In 2014, Kaveh founded Divedapper, a home for dialogues with the most vital voices in American poetry. With Sarah Kay and Claire Schwartz, he wrote a weekly column for the Paris Review called "Poetry RX."
For POETRY submissions:
Submit 2–4 poems per entry. Combine all poems into a single document. For poetry, we are seeking to publish the single best poem or set of 2–3 poems. The entire submission should not exceed 10 pages. Poems must contain only the poem title(s) and poem(s) without the author’s name or contact information anywhere on the submission itself. While we embrace and consider poems with diverse page presentations, there may be situations where we are unable to accommodate poems with special formatting as seen on the page.
Prizes
A prize of $1,000 plus publication for our first-place winner will be awarded in each of the three genres. Honorable mentions in each genre will receive $200 and will also be offered publication.
Selection Process
The Rumpus’s editorial teams will read all entries and pass along their top choices to the judges. Final selections will be made anonymously, and the judges will choose the winners and honorable mentions blindly. Decisions of the judges are final.
How to Submit
Writers age 18 and over are eligible to enter. Writers cannot be a current or former student of the contest judge in the genre to which they are submitting.
Simultaneous submissions are acceptable, but previously published material in any format (including blogs and social media) is not eligible. Submissions can be withdrawn from the submission system if accepted elsewhere. However, entry fees will not be refunded. Individual parts of a poetry submission (i.e. a single poem in a set) can be withdrawn by sending a message through Submittable. However, additional work will not be permitted as replacement.
Fee
The cost to submit is $20 per set of 2–4 poems (10 pages max). Writers may submit multiple groups of poems, but each entry will include a $20 submission fee.
Submissions Process
Submissions and payment for the inaugural Rumpus Prize for Poetry are conducted through this Submittable page. If you are interested in entering prose for our Fiction and/or Creative Nonfiction Prizes, please see those guidelines here. Do not combine submissions in multiple categories in the same entry.
We look forward to reading your work!