Poetry Prize
For the 2026 prize, the Autumn House staff, as well as select outsider readers, serve as the preliminary readers, and the final judge is Felicia Zamora. The winner receives publication of their full-length manuscript and $2,500. The submission period opens May 1, 2026, and closes June 30, 2026 (Eastern Time). We will announce the finalists and the winner in October 2026.
Guidelines for the Autumn House Poetry Prize
- The winner will receive book publication, a $1,000 honorarium, and a $1,500 travel/publicity grant to promote their book
- All finalists will be considered for publication
- Poetry submissions should be approximately 50-80 pages
- Each new poem should start on a new page
- Illustrations are strongly discouraged and should not comprise more than a quarter of the book
- The reading fee is $30 (We will waive the submission fee for those undergoing financial hardship or living with limited means. Before you reach out to request a waived fee, please read our full statement and instructions here. If the guidelines are not followed, we will not be able to offer a waived fee.)
- The book must be previously unpublished as a whole. However, individual pieces may have been published in journals, magazines, or anthologies. Collections that combine new work with previously published material from the author’s other books (“new and selected” collections) are not eligible.
- Use of AI to create and revise the structure, language, or creative development of the work is prohibited. This includes brainstorming, idea generation or refinement, outlining, drafting, rewriting, or developmental editing. Standard editing tools, such as spell check, grammar check, and thesaurus functions built into word processors, are permitted.
- Do not include your name anywhere on the actual manuscript; if your name appears within the body of the text, please omit it or black it out (first name is fine, but last name must be omitted)
- Do not include a bio or an acknowledgments page in the manuscript
- Feel free to include a table of contents (This does not count as part of your final page count)
- Simultaneous submissions permitted
- Friends, family members, and former students of judges or Autumn House editors may not submit to the prize. Students do not include interactions at short-term residencies or fellowships.
- Former employees of Autumn House, including interns, may not submit to the prize.
If you have any questions, please check our FAQ page.
Felicia Zamora is the author of eight books of poetry including, Murmuration Archives, Akrilica Series, Noemi Press (2026), Interstitial Archaeology, Wisconsin Poetry Series (2025), I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize (2021) and the 2022 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry, Body of Render, Benjamin Saltman Award winner (2020), and Of Form & Gather, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner (2017). She’s won the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, C.P. Cavafy Prize, Wabash Prize, Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and two Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards (2024 & 2022). She has been supported by a Tin House Next Book Residency, Yaddo Residency, Ragdale Fellowship, and CantoMundo Fellowship. Her writing appears in Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Alaska Quarterly Review, The American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Brevity, Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, Orion, Ploughshares, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, and others. She is a poetry editor for Colorado Review and an associate professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati, where she is a 2025-2026 Taft Research Center Fellow.
Winners of the Autumn House Poetry Prize
| Year | Author | Title | Judge |
| 2025 | Laurie Ann Guerrero | REDWORK | Matthew Olzmann |
| 2024 | Betsy Fagin | self-driving | Kazim Ali |
| 2023 | Darius Atefat-Peckham | Book of Kin | January Gill O’Neil |
| 2022 | Jennifer Conlon | Taking to Water | Carl Phillips |
| 2021 | Sara R. Burnett | Seed Celestial | Eileen Myles |
| 2020 | Shayla Lawz | speculation, n. | Ilya Kaminsky |
| 2019 | makalani bandele | under the aegis of a winged mind | Cornelius Eady |
| 2018 | Charles Kell | Cage of Lit Glass | Kimiko Hahn |
| 2017 | Melissa Cundieff | Darling Nova | Alberto Ríos |
| 2016 | Jane Satterfield | Apocalypse Mix | David St. John |
| 2015 | Brian Swann | St. Francis and the Flies | Dorianne Laux |
| 2014 | Ellery Akers | Practicing the Truth | Alicia Ostriker |
| 2013 | Danusha Lameris | The Moons of August | Naomi Shihab Nye |
| 2012 | Chelsea Rathburn | A Raft of Grief | Stephen Dunn |
| 2011 | Brian Brodeur | Natural Causes | Denise Duhamel |
| 2010 | Corrinne Clegg Hales | To Make It Right | Claudia Emerson |
| 2009 | Jacqueline Berger | The Gift that Arrives Broken | Alicia Ostriker |
| 2008 | Mary Crockett Hill | A Theory of Everything | Naomi Shihab Nye |
| 2007 | Miriam Levine | The Dark Opens | Mark Doty |
| 2006 | Nancy Pagh | No Sweeter Fat | Tim Seibles |
| 2005 | Ada Limon | lucky wreck | Jean Valentine |
| 2004 | Ruth L. Schwartz | Dear Good Naked Morning | Alicia Ostriker |
| 2003 | Deborah Slicer | The White Calf Kicks | Naomi Shihab Nye |
We strive to run our prizes ethically and subscribe to CLMP’s guidelines. We encourage you to reach out if you are uncertain about a potential conflict of interest.
