We will be accepting submissions to the Fourth Annual Arthur Smith Poetry Prize through September 30, 2024. This competition seeks full-length poetry collections by a single poet. Here is the important information about the competition:
Deadlines and Prizes
- Accepting Submissions June 1 through September 30, 2024.
- Winners will be announced in January 2025
- Winning poet receives: a $1,000 advance; a standard royalty contract; and 10 copies of the published book.
- Finalists will also be considered for future publication.
Competition Guidelines
- Simultaneous Submissions: Simultaneous submissions are acceptable. Please notify Madville Publishing immediately if your manuscript is accepted elsewhere.
- Eligibility: We will be happy to receive work by any poet writing in English. Poems published in print or online periodicals, anthologies, or chapbooks may be included, but the manuscript itself must be unpublished. Original work only; translations are ineligible.
- Format: Minimum of 48 pages. There is no maximum length, but we expect manuscripts not to be much more than 90 pages. Pages should be numbered with no more than one poem per page. Please include a title page with title only, a table of contents, and an acknowledgments page.
- Multiple Submissions: Submission of more than one manuscript is acceptable, but each manuscript must be submitted separately and include a separate entry fee.
- International Submissions: We accept international submissions.
- Revisions: The winner will have the opportunity to revise the manuscript before publication. No revisions will be considered during the reading period.
- SUBMISSIONS SHOULD BE BLIND. PLEASE DO NOT INCLUDE AUTHOR NAME ANYWHERE ON THE MANUSCRIPT.
- Entry Fee: $25
- Deadline: September 30, 2024
- Winner will be announced January 2025.
We remember Art Smith as a good friend to many as Jesse Graves, our first judge for the competition, shares in this essay for Chapter 16. (Click the image at left to read the full essay).
Judges 2024
Allison Joseph directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Southern Illinois University. She serves as poetry editor of Crab Orchard Review, the publisher of No Chair Press, and the director of Writers In Common, a writing conference for writers of all ages and experience levels.
Her poetry collection, Confessions of a Barefaced Woman (Red Hen 2018), was the Winner in the 2019 Feathered Quill Book Awards poetry category. Her books and chapbooks include What Keeps Us Here (Ampersand), Soul Train (Carnegie Mellon UP), In Every Seam (University of Pittsburgh Press), Worldly Pleasures (Word Tech Communications), Imitation of Life (Carnegie Mellon UP), Voice: Poems (Mayapple Press), My Father’s Kites (Steel Toe Books), Trace Particles (Backbone Press), Little Epiphanies (NightBallet Press), Mercurial (Mayapple Press), Mortal Rewards (White Violet Press), Multitudes (Word Poetry), The Purpose of Hands (Glass Lyre Press), Double Identity (Singing Bone Press) Corporal Muse (Sibling Rivalry Press) and What Once You Loved (Barefoot Muse Press).
Preliminary Readers:
Shlagha Borah (she/her) is from Assam, India. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Cincinnati Review, ANMLY, Salamander, Nashville Review, Florida Review, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and is an Editorial Assistant at The Offing. She has received support for her work from Brooklyn Poets, SAFTA, The Hambidge Center, The Peter Bullough Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She co-founded Pink Freud, a student-led collective working towards making mental health accessible in India. Find her on Instagram @shlaghab and X @shlaghaborah.
(photo by Rajdeep Kataki)
Edison Jennings lives in Southern Appalachia, working as a Head Start aide and GED tutor. He holds a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship. His poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Poetry Daily, Rattle, Slate, Southern Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. His Intentional Fallacies is available at Broadstone Books.
(photo credit: towncreekpoetry.com
The 2023, 3rd Annual Arthur Smith Poetry Prize
The winners are, once again, stunning. Grateful thanks to our 2023 final judge, Marilyn Kallet, and our amazing, hard-working preliminary readers, Joshua Robbins and Darius Stewart.
Amanda Chimera
WINNER OF THE 2023 ARTHUR SMITH POETRY PRIZE
poems by Mary B. Moore
ISBN: 978-1-963695-05-2 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-963695-06-9 ebook $9.99
January 21, 2025
Amanda Chimera by Mary B. Moore explores our hybrid nature as body and something else––mind, soul, spirit––through poems spoken by and about the persona Amanda. Haunted by her vanished twin, Gloria, who died in utero and some of whose DNA she absorbed, Amanda views herself as hybrid and thus as a monster, a carrier of the dead. Grounded in nature’s grace and variety, domestic life, and family dynamics, poems on art and myth focus on hybrid creatures, paralleling Amanda and Gloria. The sisters’ relationship is as varied as the poems’ tones: as Amanda says, she “likes a mixed diction.” Sometimes loving or sorrowful, sometimes witty and wry, the work revels in image and word music.
Incidental Pollen
RUNNER UP FOR THE 2023 ARTHUR SMITH POETRY PRIZE
Poems by Ellen Austin-Li
ISBN: 978-1-963695-25-0 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-963695-26-7 ebook $9.99
May 21, 2025
Incidental Pollen refers to pollen that collects on bees as they forage for nectar—like the cumulative life experiences we cannot help but carry. The hive serves as a thematic thread in this collection that explores the space between past and present, shame and redemption, grief and resilience. Poetic forms lend meaning—like the villanelle that captures the grief-driven magical thinking of the speaker. Are recurring red fox sightings visitations from her deceased father and nephew? Trauma and loss appear in these tonally rich and imagistic poems, but the arc ultimately centers on the search for belonging, the attempt to recreate home.
The 2nd Arthur Smith Poetry Prize went to two amazing California poets
by linda ravenswood
won, (January 2024)
by Yiskah Rosenfeld
is the first finalist
(June 2024)
Many thanks to our amazing judges: Charlotte Pence (who was the final judge), Candance Reaves and Catherine Pritchard Childress (who read all 52 submissions).
The 1st Arthur Smith Poetry Prize
First place went to Lisa J. Parker for The Parting Glass.
The runner-up for 2022, (and Jesse says it was a close, close race!) is Susan O’Dell Underwood’s Splinter.
for whom the contest is named.
ARTHUR SMITH was born in central California. He received degrees from San Francisco State University (B.A., M.A.) and from the University of Houston (Ph.D.). He passed away on November 9th, 2018. To those who knew and loved him, he was a master teacher and a masterful poet. His first book of poems, Elegy on Independence Day, was awarded the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1985. That same year, it was selected by the Poetry Society of American to receive the Norma Farber First Book Award. His second book of poems, Orders of Affection, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 1996, and his third book, The Late World, was published in 2002, also by Carnegie Mellon University Press. His most recent book of poems is The Fortunate Era (2013). His work has been honored with a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and he was selected as the Theodore Morrison Fellow in Poetry for the 1987 Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. He served two terms as an advisory member of the Tennessee Arts Commission Literary Panel, and he was a Professor of English at the University of Tennessee. His poems have appeared in numerous journals including The Nation, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, and North American Review.—Curt Rode
MORE INFO: Email questions/comments to info@madvillepublishing.org, but please do not send your manuscript to this email address. We only accept submissions through Submittable.