Open for submissions until 5 May 2024 (23:59 GMT)*
1ST PRIZE £250
2ND PRIZE £50
3RD PRIZE £25
Our judge, Riley O’Connell, will also select up to 15 additional entries to be commended and published alongside the prizewinners in a special issue of The Passionfruit Review.
*Note: this deadline has been extended (previously 30 April) due to technical issues which hindered access to submissions in the last week of April.
ABOUT THE THEME
For this contest, we are especially interested in poetry that engages with the theme of conversation.
Send us your poems about first words and last words; declarations of love and deliveries of bad news; poetry full of intimate whispers and poetry that shouts into the void; poems about navigating disagreement; poems about life-changing conversations and about life’s most mundane chatter.
In short: if you have ever written a poem about human interaction (or even a lack of interaction), we want to read it.
As always, we are open to broad interpretations of the theme – feel free to surprise us and to stretch our imagination!
A Note from the judge
Some of my favourite aspects of poetry are its ability to speak directly to the reader, whether literally or emotionally; to blend humor and intensity, joy and heartbreak, the serious and the mundane; to move freely both in and out of form. In this way, poetry becomes conversational and lasting, more human.
As said in the Call (above), please make the prompt work for you: send us your poems answering questions (á la Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers); centos and other found poetry; poetry inspired by or in conversation with other poets; epistolaries or dedications; poems envisioning conversations that didn’t (but maybe should) happen; modern retellings of myths (think Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red or Natalie Diaz’s When My Brother Was an Aztec)… The options are endless.
Thank you for the chance to consider your poems — I am so eager to read them, and to place them in conversation with one another.
Submission Guidelines
- The entry fee (per submission of up to 3 poems) is £4. If the fee prevents you from entering the contest, get in touch with us at editor@passionfruitreview.com
- Submissions are open to all poets writing in English.
- Only previously unpublished work will be considered. Authors retain all rights, we simply ask that you allow Passionfruit first publication and credit this in any later iterations of your piece.
- Strong language is fine – abusive or discriminatory language is not.
- Simultaneous submissions are welcome – just let us know promptly via the submissions manager if you need to withdraw any of your poems.
- Poems up to 40 lines – including spaces – will be considered. Note that we consider longer poems as general submissions!
- Please also note that the review process will be kept strictly anonymous. Do not include any identifying information in your attached documents.
About RILEY O’CONNELL
In the first grade, a teacher told Riley O’Connell to ‘get her nose out of a book and get a life’—advice which she did not heed. An award-winning poet based in the Bay Area, Riley is an Editor for Colossus Press, an obsessive crocheter, and lover of all things strawberry, girlhood, and graham cracker-crusted. Twenty-six, she has poems published in Plainsongs, La Piccioletta Barca, Not Very Quiet, Making Waves, Pink Panther Magazine, Evocations Review, The Passionfruit Review, and The Santa Clara Review, the last of which she later served as Editor in Chief.
You can read some of Riley’s poetry in Issue 1 of The Passionfruit Review.
