Poetry contests with money behind them
A poetry contest for scholarships is a judged poetry competition that pays a scholarship award, a cash prize, or both, to the writers it ranks highest. The contest is the mechanism: an open call with rules, an entry fee or a free entry window, a deadline, a judging panel, and a published list of winners. River & Sound Review runs that mechanism in miniature every season, judging open submissions against fixed criteria and posting results, so its archive is one of the few public records of what actually wins in small literary journals. That record matters because the big cash and scholarship contests, the ones with 5 digit prize pools and national reach, rarely publish what their winners share in common, while small journals do.
This page lists the main contest families where scholarships and real cash are on offer, maps the deadlines a working writer can actually track, and then reads River & Sound's own judging history under Contests and prizes to extract what tends to win. Because the same writers who enter cash contests also enter the open calls that lead to publication, the page covers the free entry routes as well, and it names the horror and speculative calls, such as the Horror short story contests that share judges and readers with the poetry scene, alongside the craft details that decide a cover letter, in the Submission Cover Letters section below.
What a poetry contest is, and what it is called
A poetry contest is a judged competition in which entrants submit 1 to 3 poems, usually unseen, and a panel of 2 to 5 judges ranks the field before prizes are paid and winners announced. The field uses several names for the same object, and the name usually signals the money structure. A scholarship contest pays an education award, often with a cash component on top. A cash prize contest, the form behind every search for a poetry contest cash prize, pays a fixed sum to the first prize and smaller sums to runners up. A poetry broadside contest, the best known example of the free route, prints a single winning poem on a broadside and costs the writer 0 dollars to enter. A poetry contest entry is the unit of competition: one entry is one poem, or one set of poems, submitted to one call before its deadline, and most calls cap entrants at 3 entries per round. The broadside format dates back to the 1980s in North America, when small presses began printing single poems as collectibles, and the format still anchors the free end of the market.
Scholarship contests and cash prize contests
The contest with money behind it splits into two families, and a writer can tell them apart by reading one line: the prize line.
- Scholarship contests pay an education award, and the flagship is the Geraldine R. Friedman Scholarship, run by the Academy of American Poets, which has awarded a 10,000 dollar scholarship to a single undergraduate since 2000.
- The Emily Dickinson International Prize pays 1,000 dollars and publication in a volume, open to poets of any nationality.
- Expedition 33, the New York City literary organization, has run poetry prizes tied to its readings since the 1990s, and its calls are a useful benchmark for the cash end of the small contest market.
- Griffin Poets Workshop, based in Edmonton, has awarded the Griffin Prize since 1984 and pays 25,000 Canadian dollars to a first collection, the largest recurring poetry prize in Canada.
- The Glass Poetry Prize pays 1,000 dollars for a single poem, a cash call with a famously small entry pool.
- The Broadside Poetry Contest pays 1,500 dollars, publication as a broadside, and a 2 day residency, at a 0 dollar entry fee.
A free poetry contest is any call with a 0 dollar fee, and the broadside is its archetype: the writer pays nothing, the prize is print plus cash, and the deadline falls in the spring. For the money, the pattern holds across every geography a searcher asks about. In the UK, the Forward Prize has paid 5,000 pounds for the best first collection since 1987, with a 500 pound shortlist prize per category. In Australia, the W.E. Hughes Poetry Prize pays 7,500 Australian dollars. In Canada, the Griffin stands at 25,000 Canadian dollars, and the CBC Radio poetry contest has aired and paid winners since the 2010s. In India, the T. S. Eliot Prize for translation and the national poetry awards run through literary councils rather than single organizations. Boston readers enter through Boston University calls and the Boston Poetry Festival, Los Angeles through the Academy of American Poets' national calls and local library open mics that double as discovery events, and Las Vegas through the Nevada Humanities poetry prizes. College students should watch the Friedman and the college journal contests, which pair a 500 to 2,000 dollar scholarship with publication in a campus journal, while teens have a dedicated track at the National YoungArts Foundation, which has honored young writers since 1982, and schoolers below that age meet contests run by school libraries and state writing programs.
Deadlines, regions, and the seasonal calendar
Deadlines are the part of a poetry contest that writers actually plan around, and the calendar below tracks the calls that recur on a yearly cycle, with the months in which their windows have historically opened and closed.
| Contest | Prize | Typical window | Open to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Geraldine R. Friedman Scholarship | 10,000 dollars | March to May | US undergraduates |
| Griffin Prize (Griffin Poets Workshop, Edmonton) | 25,000 Canadian dollars | April to June | Canadian first collections |
| Broadside Poetry Contest | 1,500 dollars plus a residency | February to April | US and Canadian poets, 0 dollar fee |
| Emily Dickinson International Prize | 1,000 dollars plus a volume | Year round, 3 deadlines | Any nationality |
| Glass Poetry Prize | 1,000 dollars | Rolling, 6 windows a year | US poets |
| Forward Prize | 5,000 pounds | June deadline | UK first collections |
The seasonal read is simple. Scholarship money concentrates in the spring, cash prizes spread across the year, and the free contests cluster in early to mid year. A writer searching for a poetry contest in July 2025 should hold for the fall openings of the international calls, a writer hunting a poetry contest in December 2025 should read the year round calls that accept rolling entries, and a writer planning ahead for a poetry contest in August 2026 or a poetry contest in Canada 2026 should mark the April to June collection deadlines. The same calendar logic answers the regional searches: British Columbia poets enter the Canadian calls, and the American, international, UK, and Australian tracks above each run their own fixed window.
The judges' record at River & Sound Review
River & Sound Review is a new, unaffiliated project documenting the independent literary journal of that name, its issues, and the works they published, and its value to a contest writer is the only published record of what a small journal's judges rewarded, issue by issue. The journal ran open calls in the 2010s and 2020s, accepted 1 to 3 poems per submission, and published its selections with the judges' names on the masthead. Reading its winners against the big prize lists, three patterns survive the small sample size.
- Specificity beats abstraction: the published poems name places, objects, and 1 concrete moment per image, the same test a scholarship panel applies when it reads 100 entries for a single award.
- Line breaks earn their place: the journal's selections break lines where the syntax turns, not at the margins, which matches how broadside judges describe a winning single poem.
- The cover letter is short and factual: the winning submissions' letters state the poem's origin in 2 to 3 sentences, and nothing else.
The joke contest is the exception that proves the rule. A poetry contest joke entry, submitted for laughter, never wins cash, but the journal published 2 of them in a single issue, which is exactly the behavior a free publication route has that a prize route does not: it can say yes to the odd poem, because the prize is print, not a dollar amount.
How to enter and how to write the cover letter
To enter, a writer follows a 5 step process that every call on this page runs the same way.
- Read the rules for the entry count, the format, and the fee, which is 0 dollars for the free contests and 10 to 15 dollars for most cash calls.
- Submit 1 to 3 poems, formatted as the call requires, before the deadline in the table above.
- Write the cover letter: 3 sentences, the poem's origin, the writer's name, and the contact line, nothing more.
- Track the result window, which is 2 to 4 months after the deadline for most calls, and the year long archive for the journal's issues.
- Enter the next call in the calendar, because the writers who win the 1,000 dollar prizes are the ones whose entry counts reach 3 digits a year.
The cover letter is the part most writers overwork. The journal's published winners show the working pattern: state where the poem came from in 1 sentence, say what it is trying to do in 1 sentence, and give the logistics in 1 sentence. That 3 sentence letter is the Submission Cover Letters standard the page recommends, and it survives every format from a 1,000 dollar single poem prize to a 25,000 Canadian dollar collection prize, because a judge reading the 1,000th entry in a cycle stops skimming anything longer.