Hello, poets! Happy August, aka a month-of-low-creativity (amIright?) followed by a month of renewal—September. Can’t you just smell the new No. 2 pencils and your Trapper Keeper? Sorry, kids. The smell of my Notes app just isn’t the same.
This September will bring some exciting changes for Poet to Poet. All summer I’ve been working on several new regular content features centered on one critical goal: helping you develop your poetry manuscript and submit it with more focus, all with more fidelity to your own voice.
Press Intelligence is one piece of it. Starting next month, each issue will include a profiles of a press or contest—profiles of key poetry presses with upcoming deadlines, including details that help you submit smarter: an analysis of the list’s most recent titles, revealing their stylistic preferences and editorial slants, plus “right for you if / not right for you if…” checklists.
The idea is to cut down on guesswork and wasted entry fees, so your time and fees go toward presses that are genuinely a fit.
More on what else is coming soon. For now, check out the preview of Press Intelligence below.
Upcoming Deadlines
August 31 — Howling Bird Press Book Prize
August 31 — The Off the Grid Poetry Prize for poets over 60 [see Press Intelligence, below]
September 30 — Juniper Prize (UMass Press) [see Press Intelligence, below]
November 4 — The Conduit Books Minds on Fire Open Book Prize
New Poetry Books
That Summer’s End: Poems by Lee Seong-Bok. “The poems of That Summer's End, though acutely conscious of the self, are free of an inhibiting self-consciousness, speaking directly of youth, love, fear, family, grief, old age, impermanence, and all that's central to life.”
I’ll Leave a Light on for You by William Bortz, “weaves a haunting yet hopeful collection of poems that explore the body's relationship with joy and grief.”
Fire in the Mind by Catharine Savage Brosman. “The iambic rhythm is felt everywhere, whatever the line and stanza forms--crafted, controlled free verse, blank verse, or traditional rhymed, metered lines. These poems ‘shake with being.’”
Workshops, Events & More
The Hugo House runs online and in-person workshops. They are a nonprofit literary arts organization who aim to celebrate storytelling and create a space for writers to develop and share their work. You can find their monthly calander here, which contains the various readings and writing sessions offered, spanning across a variety of topics and genres. Summer classes are currently open to enrollment!
Poets for Science Gathering– Along with poets Sarah Giragosian and Maggie Greaves, I will be co-leading Scale as Poetic and Scientific Playground: From Gut Flora to Supernovae at the Poets for Science Gathering. From gut flora to cosmic events written in trees, from molecular agencies to the vast temporalities of galaxies, scale is rich territory for both scientists and poets. Session date/time TBD. November 12-14, 2026 at Kent State University, Kent, Ohio.
Advice
“Editing the anthology sharpened my editorial instincts. It made me more sensitive to revision, not only in my own work but in the work I edit for others. It also reminded me that there isn’t a single correct way for a poem to sound or look. Seeing so many different poetic philosophies gathered together strengthened my own convictions while also keeping me open to possibilities I hadn’t previously considered.” –Ruben Quesada
Quesada’s insight here underscores what I encourage my workshop participants to consider: When you invest in becoming the best reader possible for your peers, your own work also benefits.
Press Intelligence
Submit smarter with poetry publisher insights.
Starting in September every issue of Poet to Poet will include Press Intelligence, monthly profiles of poetry presses with upcoming deadlines.
This month: one of the first and most prestigious university press contests that publishes two titles, debut poets welcome, plus a prize that won’t read your manuscript until you’re 60.
Enjoy this sneak peek!
Off the Grid Prize (Off the Grid Press)
Eligibility: open only to poets aged 60 or older. This is an age- and career-stage-restricted prize, not a general-submission press.
Founded: Off the Grid Press, 2003; the Off the Grid Prize itself, 2011. Editorial control passed to Elizabeth Murphy in 2015, who relaunched the operation as Grid Books with Off the Grid Press as its imprint.
Submission model: Annual contest.
Reading period: May 1 – August 31, 2026 (this cycle).
Entry fee: $25. No fee waiver found in any source — flagging as unconfirmed rather than assuming none exists.
Debut-friendly: Sometimes. One of four recent winners (Okie’s Woman at the Crossing) was an explicit debut collection.
Titles per year: One, through the contest. Grid Books separately publishes additional titles per year outside the contest.
Off the Grid Press, the poetry imprint of the nonprofit Grid Books, exists for a specific purpose: one manuscript a year, by a poet over 60, whose work the contemporary market tends to overlook. Across recent winners the poems are consistently concrete before they’re abstract—a chicken’s feathers, a mammogram reimagined as a fish caught in a net, wet paint on grass at dusk, river debris—and mostly narrative in shape, though the forms themselves range widely: an unrhymed sonnet, a prose poem built on wordplay, short spare lines, long unpunctuated ones. There’s no single stylistic bent here. Recent titles swing between playful formal risk (Glaser’s punning prose poems) and plainer elegy (Stearns, Medved), suggesting the press isn’t looking for work in one register. Editor-in-Chief Elizabeth Murphy, who has run Grid Books since 2015, has described being drawn to work that resists trends and fads, with a current pull toward collaborative and oral-history-based projects.
Sample poems:
Catherine Stearns, “Snow in August”
Susan Okie, “After the Mammogram”
Elton Glaser, “Art and Nature”
Jane Medved, two poems in Bracken
Right for you if:
You’re over 60 and your work has been sidelined by a market that skews toward younger debuts.
You want close, high-touch editing and a press that stays in your corner post-publication (Murphy has described ongoing consultation with backlist authors).
Not right for you if:
You’re not yet 60 — no exception exists for this prize.
You’re hoping to match a specific house style; the winners show a lot of formal range, so there’s no one zone of editorial resonance.
Juniper Prize for Poetry (University of Massachusetts Press)
Founded: 1975 (launched), first prize awarded 1976. One of the earliest university press poetry prizes in the country.
Submission model: Contest judged anonymously by a single UMass MFA-affiliated faculty judge (a different judge each year; not publicly named until winners are announced in April, since the read is blind)
Reading period: August 1–September 30
Entry fee: $30 (no fee waiver found)
Winner receives: $1,000 honorarium and a publication contract with UMass Press. Note this prize is unusual in that it names two winners every year from one pool of submissions: one for a first book, one for an author who’s published before. So a single entry fee gets a manuscript read for both tracks at once if you are a first-time author.
Debut-friendly: Yes. One of the two annual prizes is reserved specifically for a first book.
Titles per year: 2 (one debut, one open track)
Recent titles: Who Follow the Gleam, Christian Wessels (2026, first book); I Love You But I Don’t Speak Your Language, Jason Bredle (2026, open track); Strange Hymn, Carlene Kucharczyk (2025, first book); Once When Green, Mark Irwin (2025, open track, his twelfth collection)
Because the manuscripts are read blind by a different judge each year, and because the prize deliberately splits between a debut and an open track, there’s no single “house voice” the way there is at a small press with one standing editor. The four recent winners bear that out. Bredle’s poems are long-lined, absurdist, and pop-culture-saturated, playing existential dread for dark comedy. Wessels works in fragmented, asterisk-broken couplets, plain-spoken but philosophically probing, closely tied to a specific domestic moment. Kucharczyk writes in flowing, digressive, conversational blocks that move associatively toward mortality with wit rather than solemnity. Irwin’s Once When Green (per its jacket copy) is more directly elegiac and mythic, addressing ecological loss. What holds the list together isn’t form or tone, it’s that each book is working through something at stake for its author (parenthood, death, ecological grief, existential dread). The throughline is not a stylistic one.
One obvious reason for that is that there isn’t a single acquiring editor shaping this list. UMass Press staff (Matt Becker, Brian Halley, Mario Pereira) oversee the press’s broader catalog, but the Juniper Prize itself is judged entirely by that year’s rotating faculty judge, blind to author identity. That’s a structurally different bet than submitting to a press with one editor’s taste to study. It’s the old conundrum: You can’t judge your fit based on house style, rather you are left to guess at whether your work will interest whoever happens to be judging the contest that year.
One additional structural note: Current UMass employees/students and past Juniper Prize for Poetry winners are ineligible to enter.
Sample poems:
Jason Bredle, “Healthy Smiths”: https://poets.org/poem/healthy-smiths
Christian Wessels, “Frog Lesson”: https://www.cortlandreview.com/issue-93/christian-wessels/
Carlene Kucharczyk, “On Beholding the Beloved’s Rotting Body”: https://www.tupeloquarterly.com/poetry/on-beholding-the-beloveds-rotting-body/
Right for you if:
· You have a manuscript with real personal or thematic stakes, regardless of whether your formal approach is spare or maximalist, comic, or elegiac.
· You’re a first-time author. Half the prize is reserved for exactly that, and the anonymous judging means a debut competes on the manuscript alone.
Not right for you if:
· You’re hoping to study editorial taste and determine your work’s fit. There isn’t one fixed taste to study here, since the judge changes every year.
That’s all for now. Until next month, happy submitting. And, as always, thank you for being here. If you find Poet to Poet useful, please like and comment on this post publicly. And share.
In gratitude,
Radha
Radha Marcum | poettopoet.com
Bainbridge Island Press has a few podcasts for poets on book formatting. If poets listened to those in tandem with submitting, it would make a lot of publishers very happy! For example, long lines: if the line is formatted for an 8.5x11 page, and it's going into a 6x9 book, the line is going to get reformatted. Something to consider (we've had to rearrange quite a few poems for this, so it's fresh in my mind) https://bainbridgeislandpress.substack.com/podcast