The 2023 Ghost Peach Press Prize

This contest for a full-length poetry collection is open to any poet writing in English who has not yet published more than one full-length book in poetry (poets with multiple chapbooks ​are ​eligible), and offers a cash prize of $1,000 and publication, as well as ten copies of the published book. This contest is now open.

The brilliant Tiana Clark will judge the contest.

Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark is a winner for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award (Claremont Graduate University), a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, and the 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. She is a recipient of the 2021-2022 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and 2019 Pushcart Prize. Clark is the 2017-2018 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House Online, Kenyon Review, BuzzFeed News, American Poetry Review, Oxford American, The Best American Poetry 2022, and elsewhere. She teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters.

Entries will first be read blind by Ghost Peach Press’s panel of editors, and 2023 judge Tiana Clark will choose the winning collection from ten finalists. All manuscripts should include a title page, table of contents, and an acknowledgements page (if applicable). No identifying information should be included in the submission. Manuscripts should be paginated and formatted in a pleasant-to-read font (as in, not comic sans), with no more than one poem per page. Manuscripts should consist of 48 – 75 pages of poetry (not including front and back matter). We prefer that you are ethical and do not submit if you are related to/work with/are besties with or otherwise have personal connections to the judge which could cause your work to be recognized.

Ghost Peach Press accepts the $22 entry fee exclusively through our Submittable page. The entry fee is due at the time of submission. Please email us at coatofbirdseditors@gmail.com if this fee causes a financial burden. The contest runs from January 1st, 2023 – May 1st, 2023. The winner will be announced by November 2023 and publication is expected in the fall of 2024.

Past winners include: Laura Page, Dove and Coyote (available here), Mirande Bissell, Stalin at the Opera (available here), Gion Davis, Too Much (available here) and Loisa Fenichell, wandering in all directions of this earth (fall 2023).