Amazon's New Poetry Contest Offers $5,000 Cash Prize and Publishing Contract

Posted on November 5, 2015

Amazon Publishing is getting serious about poetry. It just announced a call for submissions for its Little A Poetry contest. The contest was set up to discover talented emerging poets. Amazon has lined up some serious poets to judge the contest: Cornelius Eady, Jericho Brown and Kimiko Hahn.

The winner of the contest will receive $5,000 cash and a publishing contract with Little A, as well as a $2,000 advance. Little A is Amazon's literary imprint. Submissions run not through December 20, 2015, and are open to poets who have published no more than one book of poetry. Poets should submit an entire collection of poems suitable for publication. The winner's manuscript will be published in paperbook and ebook in 2017, and will be edited by Little A's editor, the Pushcart Prize-winning poet Morgan Parker.

Judge Jericho Brown said in a statement, "I'm overjoyed to be involved with this contest and look forward to reading the submissions. There are so many talented emerging poets working today that are deserving of an audience and I'm excited to help get their work published."

Mr. Brown's first book won the American Book Award. He has also won the Whiting Award, is a recipient fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, The Iowa Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The Best American Poetry. His most recent book of poetry is The New Testament. He is currently an associate professor of English and creative writing at Emory University.

Judge Kimiko Hahn is a Distinguished Professor in the English department at Queens College/CUNY. She has authored nine collections of poetry. She won an American Book Award for The Unbearable Heart. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award.

Judge Cornelius Eady is the author of Hardheaded Weather, Brutal Imagination, which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in Poetry, and many other books. He is the winner of the Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. A co-founder of Cave Canem, a nonprofit that serves black poets, he currently holds the Miller Chair in Poetry at University of Missouri.

You can find out all you need to know about the contest here.