The 2018 Penny-Farthing Prize is now closed. Thank you to everyone who entered! The final winnings pot is $1488.00.

Check back in March 2019 for the results.

Happy New Year from all of us at Guesthouse.

Guesthouse is pleased to announce The Penny-Farthing Prize for Lyric Poetry, designed to honor the best lyrical poetry written today and harness the community-building power of competition in the arts. One poem will be selected by our judge as the winner. We hope to model a new formula for our poetry contest by borrowing what we see working among our peers and predecessors but also testing the waters of a transparency-based approach. As is suggested by the contest’s title, we will divvy up the contest proceeds into four pots.

Each submission costs the poet $13.69. After fees, we add $12.00 to the contest pool. From each $12 entry:

$3.00 will go directly to the winner as a cash prize;
$3.00 will provide an honorarium for our guest judge;
$3.00 will go back into Guesthouse’s coffer to pay administrative fees; and
$3.00 will be donated to the Iowa Youth Writing Project, an Iowa City-based nonprofit that "that aims to join Iowa City’s unique literary heritage with Iowa’s larger community by empowering, inspiring, and educating Iowa’s youth through language arts and creative thinking." More info about the IYWP here.

We will keep a running ticker on our website so our readers and submitters can track the growth of the sum pot; we hope that it will be exciting to watch the number grow as we accrue more submissions, and that the extent of the prize money will remain a surprise until our reading period closes.

2018 Judge: Diane Seuss

We're so proud to announce that Diane Seuss, Issue 1 contributor, will serve as the judge for the inaugural Penny-Farthing prize.

Diane Seuss’s most recent collection, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, was released in 2018 by Graywolf Press. Four-Legged Girl, published in 2015 by Graywolf Press, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open won the Juniper Prize and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2010. Her poetry has appeared in a broad range of literary magazines, including American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Iowa Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The New Yorker. Seuss was Writer in Residence for many years at Kalamazoo College and has been the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of English at Colorado College. She was raised in rural Michigan, which she continues to call home.

Guidelines:

Each entry may comprise up to five poems. Deadline is November 5, 2018 at 12AM CST. There is no page limit per poem or submission, but do begin each new poem on a new page. Long poems, short poems, wide poems, slim poems. Send us your best.

Send submissions us via Submittable under the contest category. See link below.
Each submission must be accompanied by an entry fee. Multiple entries are fine and encouraged, just pay one entry fee per submission.
No identifying information can appear anywhere on your manuscript.
Poems must be previously unpublished, but we welcome simultaneous submissions so long as you inform us (via a note in Submittable) if your work is accepted elsewhere.
Poems in translation are not allowed. Co-authored poems are allowed so long as both parties agree to these guidelines.
Please do not submit if you have a close, personal relationship to our final judge that would make it so that they could recognize your work. If you want to confirm with us whether or not your entry might present a conflict of interest, shoot us a note and ask.

We’re looking for:

poems that have a dedication to the lyric tradition in diction, sound, and/or voice;
poems that commit to the lyric tradition of emotional centeredness and truthful expression;
poems that are rigorous in their use of image;
poems that usurp, break, or reframe the lyric tradition in form and/or content;
and/or poems that re-define the lyric tradition in a way we can't yet anticipate.