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 2024 Adroit Prize for Poetry will be selected by Ocean Vuong. The 2024 Adroit Prize for Prose will be selected by Kaveh Akbar. 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 2023). 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 judges' 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. 

2024 Judges

Kaveh Akbar (Prose)’s work appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of the New York Times best-selling novel Martyr! (Knopf, 2024), as well as two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf Press, 2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books, 2017) He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine (Penguin Classics 2022). The recipient of honors including multiple Pushcart Prizes, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, and the Levis Reading Prize, Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, teaches at the University of Iowa and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson, and serves as Poetry Editor of The Nation. In 2014, Kaveh founded Divedapper, a home for dialogues with the most vital voices in American poetry, and with Sarah Kay and Claire Schwartz, he wrote a weekly column for the Paris Review called “Poetry RX.”

Ocean Vuong (Poetry) is the author of the New York Times bestselling poetry collection and novel, Time is a Mother (Penguin Press, 2022) and On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press, 2019).  A recipient of a 2019 MacArthur "Genius" Grant, he is also the author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, and winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, he lives in Northampton, Massachusetts and serves as a Professor in the Creative Writing MFA Program at New York University.