Category: Contest

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The 2026 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize is Open for Submissions!

Poet Kari Gunter-Seymour is a white-haired woman with glasses and a lovely warm smile. She's wearing a burgundy-colored sweater.

We will be accepting submissions to the Fifth Annual Arthur Smith Poetry Prize through September 1, 2025. 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 1, 2026.
  • Winners will be announced in January 2027.
  • 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published in print or online periodicals, anthologies, or chapbooks may be included, but the manuscript itself must be unpublished.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 1, 2026.
  • Winner will be announced January 2027.

submit

Our judge for 2026 is
Kari Gunter-Seymour!

Kari Gunter-Seymour is the immediate past Poet Laureate of Ohio and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship recipient. Her poetry collections include Dirt Songs (EastOver Press, 2024) winner of the 2025 Bronze IPPY Award for Poetry, 2025 NYC Big Book Award, 2025 Feathered Quill Award, 2025 National Federation of Press Women Award, 2024 POTY Author of the Year Award and STORYTRADE Award; Alone in the House of My Heart (Ohio University Swallow Press, 2022), winner of the 2024 Legacy Award, the 2023 Best Book Award, and finalist for the 2023 National Indie Excellence Award; and A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen(Sheila Na Gig Editions, 2020), winner of the 2020 Ohio Poet of the Year Award. A ninth generation Appalachian, she is the executive director of the Women of Appalachia Project and editor of its anthology series, Women Speak. Gunter-Seymour holds writing workshops for incarcerated adults and women in recovery, is a retired instructor in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University and the founder, curator, and host of “Spoken & Heard,” a seasonal performance series featuring poets, writers, and musicians from across the country. She is the editor of I Thought I Heard A Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices, funded through the Academy of American Poets and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She was selected to serve as a 2022 Dodge Poetry Festival Poet and is a Pillars of Prosperity Fellow for the Foundation for Appalachian Ohio. Her work has been featured in World Literature Today, American Book Review, Poem-a-Day, Katie Curic’s Wake Up Call and The New York Times.

Preliminary Readers:

And our invaluable readers (wonderful poets) are:

poet, Jessica Thompson is a white woman with silver in her hair and a smile that lights up her eyes. This is a headshot only.

Jessica D Thompson

Jessica D. Thompson is the author of the full-length poetry collection Daybreak and Deep, (Kelsay Books 2022), co-author of the children’s book When Animals Miss the Sun (Brick Street Poetry 2024), and The Mood Ring Diaries (Kelsay Books 2025). A native of Kentucky, she divides her time between two places: a stone house on the edge of a classified forest in southern Indiana and a 1918 log cabin in central Indiana.  She is a retired Human Resource professional and for many years she served as a volunteer in a crisis office and as a hospital and legal advocate for a battered women’s shelter. Her newest poetry collection, Birds of Thunder is forthcoming from Accents Publishing in 2026.

Summer Awad

Summer Awad smiles with winter trees in the background. She wears a black puffer coat and has long dark hair.

Summer Awad is a multi-genre writer with roots in Palestine and Tennessee. She has an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University. Her writing focuses primarily on diaspora, immigrants and refugees, women and family, identity, and social justice. She is currently working on a collection of nonfiction essays about my four years of work in refugee resettlement in Tennessee, for which I have received a generous LANDO grant from the de Groot foundation. I am also writing poetry and speculative fiction about Palestine.

Jake Lawson

Jake Lawson is an adjunct English instructor at East Tennessee State University. He is a current member of the Johnson City Poets Collective, and his work has appeared in Town Creek Poetry, the Tennessee Voices anthology, Appalachian Places, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, and The Appalachian Journal, among other publications.

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Arthur Smith Poetry Prize 2025

2025 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize Winner Medallion

The winners have been named and notified for the 2025 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize. We hope you will join us in congratulating them.

The 2025 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize Winners

“All six books [on the shortlist] had strengths, but I kept coming back to these two.”–Jeff Hardin

2025 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize Winner Medallion
Poet David B. Prather, winner of the 2025 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize. He is a white man with dark hair. He's wearing a dark blue shirt with a fabulous white and blue flower print jacket.

A Heart that Stretches the Length of the Body by David Prather

Winner

David B. Prather is the author of three poetry collections: We Were Birds (Main Street Rag, 2019), Shouting at an Empty House (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023), and Bending Light with Bare Hands: A Journal of Poems (Fernwood Press, 2025). His work has appeared in many publications, including New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, Poet Lore, The Comstock Review, etc. He lives in Parkersburg, WV. Website: www.davidbprather.com

Silver Medallion that says 2025 Arthur Smith poetry prize runner up

My Out-Migrations by Elaine Palencia

Poet Elaine Fowler Palencia. She is a white woman of indeterminate age with dark hair and glasses. She offers a welcoming smile and wears red lipstick to match her red top.

First Runner Up

Elaine Fowler Palencia grew up in Morehead, KY, and Cookeville, TN. She is the author of six books of fiction, four poetry chapbooks, and two works of nonfiction. Her most recent book is On Rising Ground: The Life and Civil War Letters of John M. Douthit, 52nd Georgia Volunteer Infantry Regiment (Mercer U. Press), about her great-great grandfather. Her work has received eight Pushcart Prize nominations and other prizes. She is the book review editor of Pegasus, journal of the Kentucky State Poetry Society, and the longtime moderator of the Red Herring Prose Workshop. Much of her writing is place-based.

Shortlist

This list of Six titles was selected by our preliminary readers, Karen George and Brian Griffin. And we thank them dearly for their time and attention over the months of submissions.

  • When Body Becomes House by Dianna Henning
  • Learning to Talk to Birds by Gregory Byrd
  • A Heart that Stretches the Length of the Body by David Prather (Winner!!!)
  • My Out-Migrations by Elaine Palencia (1st Runner Up!!!)
  • Holy Nothing by Beth Anstandig
  • Bodies of Water by Mary Hawley
a box with a link in the middle of it to all the books that have previously won the arthur smith poetry prize. There's a background image of the appalachian mountains with gray overlay on top and white text.

Arthur Smith Poetry Prize Winners

This page links to all the books we have out that have won our annual poetry prize named for beloved Appalachian poet, Arthur Smith. To read about the 2024 winners currently in production and to find out when we are accepting submissions for consideration, visit THIS PAGE.

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Judges for 2025

Tennessee poet, Jeff Hardin. You can just see him from the neck up staring at the camera with a straight, close-lipped mouth. He stands under a tree with green leaves for a background.

Our head judge for 2025 was Jeff Hardin, a long-time friend of Arthur Smith. Jeff made the hard hard decision about which collections should be the “winners.” All three judges said they were truly impressed with the quality of the submissions, which made the decisions really difficult. (Thanks so much to all who submitted!)

Jeff Hardin is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Watermark,  A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, No Other Kind of World, and Small Revolution. His work has been honored with the Nicholas Roerich Prize, the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, and the X. J. Kennedy Prize. Originally from Savannah, Tennessee, he has taught for almost three decades at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, Tennessee.

Photo: A. J. Holmes

Karen George is author of the poetry collections Swim Your Way Back (2014), A Map and One Year (2018), Where Wind Tastes Like Pears (2021), Caught in the Trembling Net (2024), and forthcoming Delight Is a Field. She won Slippery Elm’s 2022 Poetry Contest, and her award-winning short story collection, How We Fracture, was released by Minerva Rising Press in 2024. She is the recipient of grants from Kentucky Foundation for Women and Kentucky Arts Council. Her poetry appears in The Ekphrastic Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Lily Poetry Review, and Poet Lore. Her latest book Caught in the Trembling Net, published by Kelsay Books, was inspired by the art, life, and writings of Frida Kahlo, Georgia, O’Keeffe, and Emily Carr. Her website is https://karenlgeorge.blogspot.com/.

Brian Griffin holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia. A former Director of Lifespan Religious Education at Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, he has taught at The University of Virginia, The University of Tennessee, and Pellissippi State Community College. His fiction and poetry appears in a number of literary journals, including Shenandoah, Mississippi Review, New Millennium Writings, Asheville Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, Poems and Plays, Snake Nation Review, Clockwatch Review, New Delta Review, The Distillery, Mixitini Matrix, A Tapestry of Voices: An East Tennessee Anthology, Knoxville Bound, Metro Pulse, Number Inc, and elsewhere. He received the Mary McCarthy Award for Short Fiction for his collection Sparkman in the Sky and Other Stories.  Single Lens Reflex, his collection of poems about surviving a domestic terrorist attack, was a finalist in the 2018 National Poetry Series. It was published in 2024 by Iris Press.

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2024 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize Winners

shallow focus yellow daisies

Art Smith Poetry Prize 2024

We are running slightly behind schedule with this, but we are thrilled to announce that we have a winner of the Arthur Smith Poetry Prize for 2024! With 110 total submissions, and only three people reading, it took us a little while. The work was all so very good.

The Winners

Animal Psalm – THE WINNER
by DeAnna Stephens


Stephens’s work has appeared in numerous journals including Cherry Tree, Feminist Studies, and Louisiana Literature and has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. Additionally, her work has received the George Scarbrough Prize for Poetry (Mountain Heritage Literary Festival), the Sue Ellen Hudson Excellence in Writing Award from Tennessee Mountain Writers, the Tusculum Review Poetry Prize, and the Tennessee Williams Festival Poetry Prize. She is the author of a chapbook, Heliotaxis, (Main Street Rag), and was inducted into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame in 2022. She currently serves as a reader for Rowayat and teaches writing, reading, and literature at Roane State Community College in Crossville, Tennessee.

No Lace Fronts in Iowa City – FIRST RUNNER UP
by Meghan Malachi

Meghan B. Malachi is a Bronx-born, Chicago-based poet and educator. She is an Associate Editor at RHINO and the Programming Coordinator at the Guild Literary Complex. Meghan is the first-place winner of the Spoon River Poetry Review 2022 Editor’s Prize Contest and a 2022 Pushcart Prize Nominee. She has also been a finalist for the 2024 Hillary Tham Capital Collection as well as the 2024 Lois Cranston Memorial Prize. Her work is published in Milly Magazine, Rabid Oak, Juked, NECTAR Poetry, Writers with Attitude, and NewCity. Her first chapbook, The Autodidact, was published by Ethel Zine & Micro Press in 2020. She teaches rhetoric and writing at Harold Washington College and Saint Xavier University.

The Rest of the Shortlist

  • Meuse is So Close to Muse by Elinor Ann Walker
  • On Men by Esperanza Cintrón
  • Sometimes I Forget How to Be a Person by Peter Grandbois
  • Titanfall by Noah Soltau

The Longlist

  • Animal Psalm by DeAnna Stephens
  • Causa Sui by Elizabeth Knapp
  • Meuse is So Close to Muse by Elinor Ann Walker
  • No Lace Fronts in Iowa City by Meghan Malachi
  • Notes on Endings by Clare Banks
  • On Men by Esperanza Cintrón
  • Sometimes I Forget How to Be a Person by Peter Grandbois
  • The 574 Calling Area’s Been Hit By the Blast by David Dodd Lee
  • Titanfall by Noah Soltau
  • What the Light Was Like by Sara Dudo

Our 2024 Judges

The 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.

Judge: Allison Joseph
Readers: Edison Jennings and Shlagha Borah

Read about previous Arthur Smith Poetry Prize winners
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     Arthur Smith Poetry Prize (2024)

appalachian mountains in north carolina

The Arthur Smith Poetry Prize opens again for submissions on June 1, 2025. We find it hard to believe this will already be our fifth such competition. Read more about the Arthur Smith Poetry Prize.

  • Accepting Submissions June 1 through September 30, 2025.
  • Winners will be announced in January 2026
  • Winning poet receives: a $1,000 advance; a standard royalty contract +10 gratis copies of the book when it is completed.
  • Finalists will also be considered for future publication.
submit

4th Annual Arthur Smith Poetry Prize (2024)

Thanks to our 2024 Judge: Allison Joseph, and our tireless Readers: Edison Jennings and Shlagha Borah. And without further ado, here are the winners!

Animal Psalm – THE WINNER
by DeAnna Stephens

Stephens’s work has appeared in numerous journals including Cherry Tree, Feminist Studies, and Louisiana Literature and has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. Additionally, her work has received the George Scarbrough Prize for Poetry (Mountain Heritage Literary Festival), the Sue Ellen Hudson Excellence in Writing Award from Tennessee Mountain Writers, the Tusculum Review Poetry Prize, and the Tennessee Williams Festival Poetry Prize. She is the author of a chapbook, Heliotaxis, (Main Street Rag), and was inducted into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame in 2022. She currently serves as a reader for Rowayat and teaches writing, reading, and literature at Roane State Community College in Crossville, Tennessee.

No Lace Fronts in Iowa City – FIRST RUNNER UP by Meghan Malachi

Meghan B. Malachi is a Bronx-born, Chicago-based poet and educator. She is an Associate Editor at RHINO and the Programming Coordinator at the Guild Literary Complex. Meghan is the first-place winner of the Spoon River Poetry Review 2022 Editor’s Prize Contest and a 2022 Pushcart Prize Nominee. She has also been a finalist for the 2024 Hillary Tham Capital Collection as well as the 2024 Lois Cranston Memorial Prize. Her work is published in Milly Magazine, Rabid Oak, Juked, NECTAR Poetry, Writers with Attitude, and NewCity. Her first chapbook, The Autodidact, was published by Ethel Zine & Micro Press in 2020. She teaches rhetoric and writing at Harold Washington College and Saint Xavier University.

The Rest of the Shortlist

  • Meuse is So Close to Muse 
    by Elinor Ann Walker
  • On Men 
    by Esperanza Cintrón
  • Sometimes I Forget How to Be a Person 
    by Peter Grandbois
  • Titanfall by Noah Soltau

The Longlist

  • What the Light Was Like by Sara Dudo
  • Animal Psalm by DeAnna Stephens
  • Causa Sui by Elizabeth Knapp
  • Meuse is So Close to Muse by Elinor Ann Walker
  • No Lace Fronts in Iowa City by Meghan Malachi
  • Notes on Endings by Clare Banks
  • On Men by Esperanza Cintrón
  • Sometimes I Forget How to Be a Person by Peter Grandbois
  • The 574 Calling Area’s Been Hit By the Blast by David Dodd Lee
  • Titanfall by Noah Soltau

Competition Guidelines

  • 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.
  • Simultaneous Submissions: Simultaneous submissions are acceptable. Please notify Madville Publishing immediately if your manuscript is accepted elsewhere.
  • 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.