Awards
Annual Awards
The PSA's Annual Awards are among the most prestigious honors available to poets. They offer emerging and established poets recognition at all stages of their careers, including our student poetry award and book awards for publishers.
Student Poetry Award
Awarded for the best unpublished poem by a student in grades 9 through 12 from the United States.
JUDGE
Megan Fernandes is a South Asian American writer living in NYC. She was born in Canada and raised in the Philadelphia area. Her family are East African Goans. She is the author of The Kingdom and After (Tightrope Books, 2015) and Good Boys (Tin House, 2020). Her third book of poetry, I Do Everything I’m Told (Tin House), was published in summer 2023. She is an Associate Professor of English and the Writer-in-Residence at Lafayette College, where she teaches courses on poetry, creative nonfiction, and critical theory. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an MFA in poetry from Boston University.
Endowed under the wills of Louise Louis Whitbread and Ruth M. Bourne.
Submission Details & Instructions
- You can only submit one entry per student.
- Teachers or administrators may submit an unlimited number of their students' poems, one submission per student.
- A poem that has previously won a PSA Award cannot be re-submitted.
- No previously published work can be submitted.
- Translations are ineligible.
- Poems by more than one author will not be accepted.
- All entries must be sent though Submittable.
- Submissions from Poetry Society employees, officers, advisory board committee members, or their immediate families are ineligible.
- All submissions are judged anonymously.
Entry Fees
High school students may submit single entries to the Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Poetry Award for $5.
High school teachers or administrators may submit an unlimited number of their students' poems (one submission per student) for a $20 entry fee.
You do not need to be a Poetry Society of America member to submit to this award.
The winners will be announced in late spring.
Four Quartets Prize
The Four Quartets Prize is for a unified and complete sequence of poems published in America in a print or online journal, chapbook, or book.
Chapbook Fellowships
Launched in 2003, the PSA's Chapbook Program publishes each winner's work as a gorgeous chapbook, allowing new voices to reach new audiences.
Frost & Shelley Awards
The Frost Medal and Shelley Memorial Award recognize lifetime and mid-career achievement in poetry. By nomination only.