Submitting For Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry

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Announcing the 2026 winner of our Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry,

Chelsea Woodard

Lentic Systems will be published in April 2027

Guidelines

The University of North Texas Press announces the 2027 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. The winner of this annual award will receive $1000 and publication by UNT Press. To avoid conflicts of interest, current or former students of the judge and series editor John Poch should not enter.

Dates for Submission

Manuscripts may be submitted between 9:00 a.m. on September 1 and 5:00 p.m. on October 31. The winning manuscript will be announced by March 2027.

We only accept electronic submissions. The $25 entry fee can be paid online via credit card or PayPal through Submittable.

Manuscript Guidelines

  1. Please be sure manuscript pages are numbered.
  2. Please include a table of contents.
  3. Poems included in the submission may have appeared previously in magazines or anthologies but may not have been previously published in a book-length collection of the author’s own work.
  4. Authors may submit more than one manuscript to the competition for consideration as long as no material is duplicated between submissions. Each submission will require a separate entry fee.
  5. Manuscripts under consideration for this competition may be submitted elsewhere at the same time. Please withdraw your manuscript if it is accepted by another publisher and should no longer be considered for the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry.
  6. Submit a 50- to 80-page manuscript. All pages indicating the poet’s identity will be removed from the manuscript prior to forwarding to the final judge. The winning manuscript will be announced by March 2026 on the UNT Press website.
  7. Manuscripts submitted for prize consideration must be entirely the creation of their authors and be produced without the use of generative AI tools. Manuscripts that are found to include text generated by AI tools will be disqualified from prize consideration. The use of basic AI tools for grammar, spelling, proofreading, etc. are considered editorial rather than creative tools and are not grounds for disqualification.

Begin the submission process here: Online Submissions

Previous Winners