The Adroit Prizes are awarded annually to two students of secondary or undergraduate status. The Adroit Journal receives exceptional work from emerging writers in high school and college, and the best of the best will be recognized by the Adroit Prizes. All secondary and undergraduate students are able to apply.
All submitted poems and prose pieces will be considered for publication in the Adroit Journal.
Winners will be awarded $200, and their work—along with the work of runners-up—will be featured in the Adroit Journal. Runners-up and finalists will receive a copy of the judges’ latest book.
Location(s)
Schedule
- TBA
Cost/Compensation
- $15 submission fee
Eligibility Requirements
- All secondary and undergraduate students are eligible, including international students and students who have graduated a semester early
Deadline
- 2025 deadline TBA
Application or Entry Requirements
- Submissions must include a cover letter.
- Each poetry submission may include up to five poems (maximum of ten pages single-spaced).
- Each prose submission may include up to three works of fiction or creative nonfiction (combined word limit of 3,500 words; excerpts are acceptable).
- Each student may send up to five separate submissions for the Adroit Prize for Poetry (each with up to five poems) and up to five separate submissions for the Adroit Prize for Prose (each with up to three works of prose), totaling ten separate submissions.
- Poems and prose pieces included in submissions may be sent to other contests and publications as well (but please disclose simultaneously submitted work in your cover letter), and may have been previously recognized by other organizations and/or featured in campus-wide publications. If work under consideration is accepted elsewhere, submitters should reach out promptly by adding a note to the corresponding submission on Submittable.
Notifications of Decisions
Financial Aid Details
- Fee waivers are available upon request
Other Dates to Keep in Mind
Have other questions?
The Adroit Journal is a quarterly literary and arts magazine that was founded in 2010 by poet Peter LaBerge. At its foundation, the journal seeks to showcase what its global staff of emerging writers sees as the future of poetry, prose, and art. Adroit has published numerous United States Poets Laureate, MacArthur Fellows, and Pulitzer Prize winners, and contributors are regularly recognized by the Best American Series, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowships, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner Fellowships in Poetry and Fiction, the Whiting Foundation’s Whiting Awards, and many more organizations that offer industry-leading funding and support. The Adroit champions work that’s bizarre, authentic, subtle, outrageous, indefinable, raw, and paradoxical.
