The Plaza Poetry Prize (60 lines)

1st prize: £4000 / $5000. 2nd prize: £300 / $360. 3rd prize: £100 / $120

60 lines maximum

The Plaza Prizes are bigger and better in 2025. We have the best judges in the world and the cash prizes aren’t too shabby either. You could win £4000 / $5000, and publication, for your poem. We will nominate the winner for The Forward Prize (worth £1000 / $1200).

Our 2025 judge is an incredibly powerful poet: Pulitzer Prize-winner, Natalie Diaz.

Natalie’s Postcolonial Love Poem won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize. Her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was winner of an American Book Award. She is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a Lannan Literary Foundation Fellow, a Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellow, and a former Princeton University Hodder Fellow.

Natalie was awarded the Princeton Holmes National Poetry Prize and is a member of the Board of Trustees for the United States Artists, where she is an alumnus of the Ford Fellowship.

Natalie is Founding Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University, where she is a Professor in the English MFA program. In 2021, Diaz was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

She resides in Phoenix, Arizona, but is currently living in Brooklyn as a Mellon Foundation Research Residency Fellowship and a
Senior Fellow at The New School Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy. She is the 2024 Yale Rosenkranz Writer in Residence.

So, send us, and Natalie, your poems. To be long-listed (that’s the final 20) is an achievement. To be shortlisted in the Top 10, or place second or third, or win will be a validation of your skills, and get you published in our third anthology, in 2025.

The Prizes

First Prize: £4000 / *$5000

Second Prize: £300 / *$360

Third Place: £100 / *$120

Top 10

The 10 shortlisted entries will be published in The Plaza Prizes Anthology 3, which will be launched at our third awards ceremony, in 2025.

Terms and Conditions

Rules

Rules

Deadline: 28th February 2025
Writers can enter any number of times. (Full Entry Fee: £12.00 / *$15.00. Additional Discounted entry: £9.00 / *$11.25.
Poems can be in any style or form, but must be in English, and written for adults.
Entries must be submitted online. No email submissions. In exceptional circumstances, postal entry may be accepted, as long as a cheque made out for the correct entry fee is sent to The Plaza Prizes Ltd. (Postal address is on Contact Form.)
Enter the correct version of your work. If you make a mistake, entry fees will not be refunded. (You will have to enter again.)

Eligibility

Read the rules carefully before entering the competition. Entry implies acceptance of all the rules and failure to comply will result in disqualification.

All entries are judged anonymously. Please do not include your name, address, phone number, email, website, X/Twitter handle etc on the document or in the file name or it will be disqualified.

Entries will be disqualified if they are over the 60 line limit, and there will be no refund.

Entries must be entirely your own work.

Entries must NOT have been published traditionally because we will publish the 10 shortlisted in our anthology. Self-published poems or poems published in online journals ARE eligible for entry.

Entries must NOT have won in any other competition. If your entry was long-listed or shortlisted in other competitions it IS eligible.

Any previous winners of The Plaza Poetry Prizes (20/40/60/Prose Poetry) are NOT eligible for entry.

Simultaneous submissions are allowed but if an entry wins a prize elsewhere, is published or scheduled for future publication, prior to the date of prize giving, you must inform us to withdraw immediately. Entry fees will not be refunded.

Length

Maximum 60 lines.

Fees

FULL ENTRY FEE: £12.00 / *$15.00 per poem.
SINGLE ADDITIONAL ENTRY: £9.00 / *$11.25

Entries must be submitted online via Jotform and paid via Paypal. No email submissions.

Format

Please just make sure your work is as easy to read as possible.)
Save as a Microsoft Word document (.doc or .docx) or PDF file with the title as the file name. Do not include your name in the file name as this will lead to disqualification.
Max 2MB file. Include the line count for the poem, top right, first page.
Do not add cover pages.
No illustrated work.

Judging

The judges’ decision is final. No individual correspondence can be entered into. Judges are unable to comment on individual entries. The Plaza Prizes reserves the right to change the judge without notice.

The Plaza Prizes reserves the right to amend the rules where it deems necessary. Any changes to the rules will be posted on our website.

Copyright

Copyright remains with the author, but The Plaza Prizes reserves the right to publish poems in an anthology and use extracts from any of the 10 shortlisted poems for publicity purposes.

Results & Awards

The Poetry 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd prize-winners will be announced on the website and social media in May 2025. The 10 short-listed entries will be published in The Plaza Prizes Anthology 3, which will be launched at our awards ceremony in October 2025.

Bursary Scheme

We have offered 250 bursaries in 2022-2024. We are offering 100 FREE ENTRY BURSARIES in 2025 across all our competitions to poets/writers on low incomes, and from underrepresented groups. You can apply for a bursary if low income, class, race, age, gender, sexuality, caring responsibilities, location, disability, or mental and physical health affects your writing. We want to discover quality new writing from diverse voices.
To apply, please contact: simon@theplazaprizes.com

The Plaza Poetry Prize