News

The editors of the Beloit Poetry Journal are pleased to accept entries for the 2026 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry. The award was established in 2017, with the support of the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. 
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All submissions will be considered for publication, and the winner will receive $1,500. Submissions will remain open through April 30. For more details, see our guidelines.

Sara Elkamel's chapbook, "Garden City," is now available for pre-order! Visit our shop today to get your hands on a copy of this winner of the 2025 Chad Walsh Chapbook Prize. Ken Chen writes of this collection, “Garden City is a lapidary, fecund investigation of the lives of women: mothers and kittens, sisters and angels—as well as female prisoners of the state, who coexist in a temporally synesthetic lockdown between pharaonic and contemporary Egypt." Pre-Order a copy today.

The editors of the Beloit Poetry Journal are delighted to announce that final judge Nikky Finney has chosen Sydney Mayes’s "Golden Glosa with My Hand Atop My Mother’s” as the winner of the 2025 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry.

Sydney Mayes is a poet from Denver, Colorado. She is the inaugural ONLY POEMS Poet of the Year. Her work can be found and is forthcoming in The Atlantic, Prairie Schooner, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast Journal, The Hopkins Review, and Poets.org among other publications. A two-time Pushcart nominee, Mayes has received scholarships and support from Sewanee Writers' Conference, Community of Writers, Lighthouse Writers and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.

Of Mayes’s poem Nikky Finney writes, “This incredible poem sees into its focal moment with the greatest of clarity, attention to detail, and astonishing matrilineal love. The architect of these words is rich in their understanding of the precious moment they have dipped the reader into. Their deep desire to build a worthy and creative vessel for our travel is levitational. A Golden Glosa takes us there. The memory of the beautician-mother teaching the poet-daughter is the engine, Tretheway’s epigraph is the oil running through the metal/mettle of memory, but the poet composes the journey with an incredible veracity of memorable verbs and a keen understanding of the power of an opening line that whispers all the way through and ultimately suspends us in the air, most especially just before they hurl us into the magnolia “Blue Magic” aroma of this simile:

She taught me the art of/ the silk press, the stiletto nail, to blow on wig glue,/ like my mouth was trying to drive/ the buffalo from the great plains.

It is a woman’s poem, a daughter’s poem, a poem of seeking and permission that Ibelieve Adrienne Rich would hold in her glorious poetic hands and wave in the air while continuing to insist that all is not lost between us."

Along with naming the winner, Finney selected three finalists, Danielle Shandiin Emerson for "Epic-yazhí of a retired Red Valley Cowboy" and Angela Narciso Torres for "Grief Triptych Beginning with a Line from Roland Barthes' Mourning Diary.”
The editors also selected as semi-finalists Cortney Lamar Charleston’s "Igbo Landing" and "Revival,” Kate O'Donoghue’s "United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, Clara-Læila Laudette’s "Emetic for the modern coward," Betsy Mitchell Martinez’s "Honors History,” Valencia Robin’s “"Lt. Uhura, Communications Officer, Star Trek" and Lisbeth White’s "Feed Store".
The winning poem will appear in an upcoming issue of the BPJ.

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We’re grateful to the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust and to all who submitted poems for this year’s contest.

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Pamela Alexander's chapbook, "Left," is now available! Visit our shop today to get your hands on a copy of this winner of the 2024 Chad Walsh Chapbook Prize. Kevin Prufer writes of this collection, “In terse lyric poetry, Alexander creates characters that seem alive in their contradictions. Like a memoir distilled into poetry, this book is alive, frightening, and humane, suggesting, always, how little we might know of each other’s inner lives. This is one of the best poetry collections I have read in years.” We know you'll love this fierce elegy. Order a copy today.

We're excited to welcome Pamela Alexander to our feature, BPJ Poets In Conversation. She spoke with us about Left, Winner of the 2024 Chad Walsh Chapbook Series.

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The editors of the Beloit Poetry Journal are delighted to announce that final judge Marilyn Chin has chosen Kate Sweeney’s “Self Portrait” as the winner of the 2024 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry.

Kate Sweeney holds an MFA from Bennington College and serves as Managing Editor for Pleiades Magazine. Kate’s poems and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming from Poet Lore, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest & elsewhere. She is author of the chapbook, The Oranges Will Still Grow Without Us (Ethel 2021”). Kate lives just north of New York City.

Of Sweeney’s poem, Marilyn Chin writes, "I love this tiara of sonnets, filled with lurid confessions and womanist high jinks. I am especially impressed by the sprinklings of brilliant assertions: 'Gender is undistinguishable from gender…' 'You were immune, an error of blood at birth, small and pale, and boned.' Perhaps this sequence was inspired by Adrienne Rich’s 'Twenty-One Love Poems,' perhaps not. Nonetheless, I believe that Adrienne Rich would’ve enjoyed reading this edgy collection.”

Along with naming the winner, Chin selected three finalists, Jennifer Martelli for “1979,” No’u Revilla for “Keep Asking Aunties,” and Sydney Mayes for “Portrait of a Negress.”

The editors also selected as semi-finalists Summer Awad’s "love in the time of clovis,” Sarah Matsui’s "Kumquat Taxonomy," Dujie Tahat’s "All-American Ghazal,”  Zuleyha Lasky’s "El-Jadida, Morocco,” Laetitia Keok’s "Intimacy Study,” Jordan Hill’s "Strips of Scar Tissue,” and Zach Linge’s "Poem Ending with a Line by Britney"

The winning poem will appear in an upcoming issue of the BPJ.

We’re grateful to the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust and to all who submitted poems for this year’s contest.