All registered students, graduate and undergraduate, may compete for the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Albert Stanburrough Cook Prize, and the Gordon Barber Memorial Prize.
Poems submitted must be unpublished or they may have been published in a university magazine. Poems written in imitation of the style of canonical poets will be considered. A student who has won a prize for poetry may not, in a later year, submit the same poems for our poetry competition. A student who has previously competed but who has not won a prize should limit resubmission to one of the poems from the earlier packet; the rest should be new.
Categories of Eligibility
(A-1) Poetry written by first-years.
(A-2) Poetry written by upper-years and graduate students.
Submission Deadline
Thursday, April 17, 2025 at NOON.
We regret that we cannot accept late submissions.
Length and Number of Submissions
Upload a single pdf document containing four to six pages of poetry; poems may be of any length and number. (Recommended: 12 pt font, double-spaced.) One submission is allowed per genre unless you have received a faculty nomination.
Pseudonym and Title Page
Your name must not appear on the entry. Instead, choose a unique pseudonym containing more than one word to avoid possible duplication, and put the letters ps (for “pseudonym”) in parentheses after it. A new pseudonym should be chosen from year to year.
On the title page of your entry, provide your pseudonym (followed by ps), Yale class or graduate status, title of the piece, and the course for which it was written, if it was written for a course. In the upper-left corner of the title page, write the appropriate category (A-1 or A-1, as described above), not the names of prizes. Please take responsibility yourself for entering your work in the appropriate category. For example:
A-1
Eli Whitney (ps)
BK ’25
“A Reading of To the Lighthouse”
English 4811
Submitting Your Entry
Follow the link below to upload your prize submission. PDF is recommended. The filename for each entry must include two pieces of information in this order: 1) prize category; 2) your pseudonym (ps).
Note: for Category A-2 submissions only, please do not provide your status or college year on the title page.
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