Dear Poets and Writers,
Thank you for your interest in the annual Yeats Poetry Prize, a public program since 1997 of the all-volunteer WB Yeats Society of NY. We welcome your submissions.
Our 2025 Judge is January O'Neil who also served as last year's judge.
Eligibility and Fees:
Poets of any age from anywhere in the world may enter our competition. The submission form on this Submittable site is open from November 1st of each year to the following February 1st. There is no limit on entries, and they can be on any topic. They must also be in English, unpublished, and no more than 60 lines in length. Longer poems will be disqualified.
First prize is $1,000, second prize is $500, and two or three honorable mentions are usually awarded at the judge's discretion.
The entry fees, which help to underwrite the competition, are $15 for the first poem and $12 for each additional poem.
Winners are announced in early March and awards are presented in New York City in April, which is National Poetry Month in the United States. Winners also receive a complimentary two-year membership in our society and their winning entries are published in the judge’s report, which is posted on our website and includes reports from prior years.
Anonymity:
This is a blind competition. All entrants remain anonymous while it is being conducted. The judge reads each poem at least once, often several times, as part of the final decision process. There are no other readers or editorial filters. No awards are announced publicly or on this site until all winners have been notified.
To help ensure the competition's anonymity, you must observe the following rules:
- Do not identify the filename for any poem or set of poems with your last name. Use titles only.
- Do not include acknowledgments, explanatory statements, reviews, resumes, autobiographical statements, photographs, illustrations, artwork, or lists of earlier publications and/or mentions in online or print media. Should you win an award, we will contact you via our Submittable form for further information.
Once entries have been submitted, no additions, deletions, or substitutions are permitted. As an alternative, you may withdraw a poem and resubmit an edited version as a new entry with a new fee – before the submission deadline. In so doing, you will forfeit the fee for the previous entry.
Any poem that fails to meet these criteria will be disqualified and the associated submission fee will not be refunded.
Submissions:
Submit your entries and payment via this Submittable site.
We also welcome mail-in entries to the WB Yeats Society of NY, c/o The National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South, New York, NY 10003. Make check payable to the Society's full name. Enclose a self-addressed, U.S. stamped envelope (SASE) to receive the printed copy of the judge’s report. Each mail-in poem must be 1) typed on a separate sheet of A4 paper (8.5x11in/0.21 x 0.297m) in 12-point Helvetica typeface, and 2) have a 3x5-in index card attached to it that includes the poet’s name, address, phone number, and email address, hand-written or typed. This information must not appear in the poems themselves.
Publication Requests:
If any of your submissions is chosen for publication before our competition judging is complete, you must inform the WB Yeats Society of NY at once by email from this site, along with the details. You may choose to publish the poem in question, but in doing so, that poem will not be considered for a Yeats Poetry Prize and the submission fee will be forfeited.
Our Namesake's Advice:
Should you require more incentive to write poetry or enter competitions, remember what W.B. Yeats is alleged to have said about taking action as a writer: Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot but make it hot by striking.
The world needs poems and poets.
Sincerely,
ANDREW J. MCGOWAN, President, on behalf of the WB Yeats Society, c/o National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South, New York, NY 10003. All inquiries must be sent via email from our website’s contact page at www.yeatssociety.nyc.
Previous Yeats Poetry Prize Judges, A-Z: L.S. Asekoff, Billy Collins, Alfred Corn, Alan Feldman, Jessica Greenbaum, Eamon Grennan, Ann Kjellberg, Campbell McGrath, Leslie McGrath, Samuel Menashe, January O'Neil, Paul Muldoon, Marie Ponsot, Alice Quinn, Spencer Reese, Grace Schulman, Harvey Shapiro, and Bill Zavatsky.
2024 WINNERS (January O'Neil, Judge)
First prize of $1,000 went to “Double Golden Shovel Sonnet Found on the Q Train” by Carlos Andrés Gómez, Atlanta, GA, and Second prize of $500 went to “Kapuśniak” by Sean Nevin, Madison, NJ. Honorable mentions included “Prayer Wing” by Dr. Punam Mony Nimchonok, Toronto, Canada; “Orlando” by Caroline King, Cambridge, MA; and “I Always Thought I’d Marry a Sasha” by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, Columbus, OH. See more detailed information on our website under AWARDS, (www.yeatssociety.nyc).
The executive board of the WB Yeats Society of NY extends its sincerest thanks to everyone who took part in the competition. We appreciate your commitment to the art of poetry.
Besides information about our prize, "Poetry & Writers" publishes an extensive list of well-respected competitions (www.pw.org). There are also websites such as “Reedsy” that contain scores of free and fee-paid contests. Take care as you search to avoid vanity publishers and phishing schemes for suspect writing programs.