The Adroit Prize for Poetry
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Thank you for your interest in the Adroit Prize for Poetry.
The Adroit Prizes are awarded annually to two students of secondary or undergraduate status. We're fortunate to receive exceptional work from emerging writers in high school and college, and the best of the best will be recognized by the Adroit Prizes.
You may use this form to submit Poetry. Click here to submit to the Adroit Prize for Prose.
The 2026 Adroit Prize for Poetry will be selected by Leila Chatti. The 2026 Adroit Prize for Prose will be selected by Karissa Chen. Please scroll down to learn more about our judges!
Submission Guidelines
All secondary and undergraduate students are eligible, including international students and students who have graduated a semester early (in this case, in December 2025). Each poetry submission may include up to five poems (maximum of ten pages single-spaced). Each prose submission may include up to three works of fiction or creative nonfiction (combined word limit of 3,500 words; excerpts are acceptable).
Each student may send up to five separate submissions for the Adroit Prize for Poetry (each with up to five poems) and up to five separate submissions for the Adroit Prize for Prose (each with up to three works of prose), totaling ten separate submissions.
Poems and prose pieces included in submissions may be sent to other contests and publications as well (but please disclose simultaneously submitted work in your cover letter), and may have been previously recognized by other organizations and/or featured in campus-wide publications. If work under consideration is accepted elsewhere, submitters should reach out promptly by adding a note to the corresponding submission on Submittable.
All submitted poems and prose pieces will be considered for publication in the Adroit Journal.
Winners will be awarded $200, and their work—along with the work of runners-up—will be featured in The Adroit Journal. Runners-up and finalists will receive a copy of the genre judge's latest book.
To accommodate this while offering free online issues, we have set a non-refundable submission fee of $15. If you require financial assistance, please download this form and follow the instructions.
Please direct any questions to editors@theadroitjournal.org.
2026 Judges
Leila Chatti (Poetry) is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), and the chapbooks Ebb (Akashic Books, 2018) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. She is the recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant, scholarships from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, The Frost Place, and the Key West Literary Seminar, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and Cleveland State University, where she is the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing & Publishing. Her poems appear in Ploughshares, Tin House, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
Karissa Chen (Prose) is the author of HOMESEEKING, a Good Morning America Book Club pick and Book of the Month pick. She is a Fulbright fellow, Kundiman Fiction fellow, and a VONA/Voices fellow whose fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, People, Eater, The Cut, NBC News THINK!, Longreads, PEN America, Catapult, Gulf Coast, and Guernica, among others. She was awarded an artist fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts as well as multiple writing residencies, including at Millay Arts, where she was a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, among others. She was formerly a senior fiction editor at The Rumpus and currently serves as the editor-in-chief at Hyphen magazine. She received an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and splits her time between New Jersey and Taipei, Taiwan.