Wisdom Quarterly: American Buddhist Journal: Poetry contest: $10,000 prize

Thursday, July 11, 2019

Poetry contest: $10,000 prize

$10,000 Rattle Poetry Prize | Deadline: July 15th

This is just a quick reminder that the 2019 Rattle Poetry Prize deadline is less than a week away!

Late Monday night, we'll start the long process of reading all the entries, and I hope your best poems will be in the running for the $10,000 first prize.

As a non-profit, Rattle's mission is to promote the practice of poetry, and this annual contest is probably the most important thing we do all year. The goal is to keep as many people as possible excited about poetry—not only reading it, but also writing and sharing it. That's why the $25 entry fee is just a year's print subscription, and that's why we've made the prize so big.

Since we never ask for donations, this also serves as our annual fundraiser. About half of your entry fee pays for the paper and postage on your subscription, which includes four issues of Rattle magazine and four single-author chapbooks—but the rest helps support our other projects, like Poets Respond, the Ekphrastic Challenge, and the Neil Postman Award for Metaphor, that pay poets but don't generate any revenue. So if you appreciate our principles of free and fair regular submissions, open access online, and eclectic and meaningful poetry, the best way to support our work is to subscribe.

And the best way to subscribe is through this contest. You might as well toss a poem or four into the ring and have a chance at the first prize, while receiving a valuable subscription and supporting Rattle in the process—it's a win-win-win!

Past winners of the Rattle Poetry Prize have ranged from students, to retired school teachers, to working lawyers, to nationally acclaimed authors. In 2012, Heidi Shuler won with the first poem she ever published. Last year it was playwright Dave Harris with his powerful poem, "Turbulence." You can read 13 years of winners (147 poems in all) at our website.

Don't let past winners be a guide for style or subject matter, though—many entrants tend to submit longer poems to this competition, assuming that more words will have a better chance at winning, but we really love short and formal poems, too. In the same way, many of the winners have been heavy and dark in subject matter, but we also love humor and beauty. Just enter your best, because we want to be eclectic. Some year, a haiku will win, and I can't wait.

There are two ways to enter: through the mail on paper, or through our Submittable portal online. Whichever you choose, we've tried to make it as easy a process as possible, and we promise to announce the winners on September 15th, as we have every year.

To read the full guidelines, click here. You can also go straight to our Submittable page, which is what about 95% of poets use.

Thanks for reading, and I do hope you enter.

Cheers,

Timothy Green

Editor / Rattle

www.rattle.com

p.s. You're receiving this email because, as someone who has submitted poems, subscribed, or purchased issues, we think these occasional updates serve your established legitimate interests, but you can unsubscribe using the link at the bottom of the email any time if you'd rather not get them.