Contest Submission - Poetry

The BLR Prizes award outstanding writing related to themes of health, healing, illness, the mind, and the body.

2027 John & Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry

Judged by Natalie Diaz    

Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. She is the author of two poetry collections, Post-Colonial Love Poem (Graywolf, 2020), winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, and When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press 2012). Diaz is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University where she directs ASU’s Center for Imagination in the Borderlands.

BLR PRIZE GUIDELINES - POETRY:

• Deadline: July 1, 2026 (11:59 p.m. EST)
• First prize is $1,000 and publication in the Spring 2027 issue of BLR.  Honorable mention winners will receive $300 and publication in the Spring 2027 issue of BLR.
• We encourage poems that are accessible to a wide audience. Characteristics we look for are vivid writing, strong narrative, and rendering the familiar new. We encourage you to peruse back issues in our archive to get a sense of our ethos.  
• You may submit up to three poems per submission (include all three in one file).
• Do not put your name or other identifying information on the manuscript document (or in the filename). Manuscripts are read blindly by reviewers, editors, and judges.
• Work previously published in print or electronically will not be considered. For BLR, “published work” means published in print in North America, or published on the Internet in electronic journals, e-zines, academic  websites, and other “public” or “official” websites. Works posted on  personal blogs or websites will be considered on a case-by-case basis.  We ask that authors be honest about web postings. (If a work is  discovered to have been posted or published elsewhere—and not openly  acknowledged by the author in advance—we will remove it from consideration.)
• Simultaneous submissions are permitted, but we ask that you notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.  We regret that there can be no refunds or substitutions for withdrawn work.
• All contest entries will also be considered for regular publication. If you submit to the contest, there is no need to submit the same piece again under the general submissions category. 
• Students/friends/colleagues/relations of a judge are not permitted to enter submissions to that judge's genre.
• BLR acquires first-time North American rights, and the right to reprint in anthologies. After publication, all other rights revert to the author and the work may be reprinted as long as appropriate acknowledgement to BLR is made.
• Contest winners are usually announced in November. Decisions for the rest of Issue 52 (to be published in Spring 2027) will be made by the end of the year.

We encourage you to read BLR before you submit.  Sample writing is available on our website.

We're happy to offer a 50% subscription discount to all authors who participate in the contest. (If you live outside the US, you must select the International option. Otherwise, we'll be unable to ship the journal to you. Thanks!)