Name for Submissions: The 2025 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize
Submission Window: Could 1 – June 1
Prize: $1,000 + Publication + Journey to Auburn College
The Southern Humanities Overview is now accepting submissions for the 2025 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, a $1,000 award that celebrates poems of witness and honors the legacy of the late poet Jake Adam York. This 12 months’s decide is the acclaimed poet and editor Nicole Sealey.
Sealey, creator of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure and Extraordinary Beast, brings a wealth of expertise and a strong voice to this 12 months’s prize. Her work has earned the OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, a NAACP Picture Award nomination, and the Ahead Prize for Greatest Single Poem.
The prize consists of:
- A $1,000 award
- Publication in Southern Humanities Overview
- A public studying and dialog with Nicole Sealey on the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Tremendous Artwork
- Journey bills to attend the Auburn occasion in October 2025
All entrants obtain a replica of Southern Humanities Overview that includes the successful poems.
What the Judges are Wanting For
Submit as much as three beforehand unpublished poems of witness. Suppose work that engages with urgent social points, shines a light-weight on ignored histories, or gives a voice the place silence as soon as reigned. Your poem ought to do what all nice poems of witness do—reckon with the previous, illuminate the current, and open new doorways to understanding.
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Submission Pointers for the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize
- Submission interval: Could 1 to June 1, 2025
- Submit by way of Submittable
- Entry payment: $15 USD
- Submit as much as three poems
- No private information on poem pages (blind submission)
- Embrace a transient cowl letter in Submittable (not on the poems)
Simultaneous submissions are welcome. You might withdraw your piece whether it is accepted elsewhere (you’ll nonetheless obtain the difficulty of SHR).
Outcomes will likely be introduced in August.
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Eligibility Necessities for the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize.
The competition is open to all, with the next exceptions:
- Mates, family members, or former college students of Nicole Sealey or SHR employees are ineligible.
- Present/former SHR employees or Auburn College staff and college students usually are not eligible.
- Auburn undergrad alumni who graduated earlier than June 2014 could apply.
- Earlier first-place winners can’t re-enter, however finalists and runners-up are welcome again.
This prize pays tribute to Jake Adam York, a fifth-generation Alabamian and Auburn alum, whose work fiercely and tenderly grappled with race, historical past, and reminiscence within the American South. His poetry stays a name to recollect, reckon, and rebuild.
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Submit your poems between Could 1 and June 1, and be a part of a convention of writers dedicated to bearing witness. Go to Southern Humanities Overview for full contest particulars.
