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AWP Award Series: Donald Hall Prize for Poetry

2025 judge: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Prize: $5,500 and publication by the University of Pittsburgh Press

Submission period: January 1–February 28, 2025

Submission fee: $30 for regular users; $20 for AWP members*

*Please be sure to submit to the correct submission category based on your current AWP membership status. The submission fee is nonrefundable.

   

Eligibility Requirements

Only book-length manuscripts are eligible. The AWP Award Series defines “book-length” as:

  • Poetry: 48 pages minimum text;

  • Short story collection or creative nonfiction: 150–300 manuscript pages; and

  • Novel: at least 60,000 and no more than 110,000 words.

Poems, stories, and essays previously published in periodicals are eligible for inclusion in submissions, but manuscripts previously published in their entirety, including self-published manuscripts, are not eligible. As the series is judged anonymously, no list of acknowledgments should accompany your manuscript.

The AWP Award Series is open to all authors writing original works primarily in English for adult readers. Mixed-genre manuscripts cannot be accepted. Criticism and scholarly monographs are not acceptable for creative nonfiction, which the AWP Award Series defines as factual and literary writing that has the narrative, dramatic, meditative, and lyrical elements of novels, plays, poetry, and memoir.

To avoid conflict of interest and to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, friends and former students of a judge (former students who studied with a judge in an academic degree-conferring program or its equivalent) are ineligible to enter the competition in the genre for which their former teacher is serving as judge.

Current staff of AWP and members of AWP’s board of directors may not enter the AWP Award Series, and previous staff and board members may not enter for a minimum of three years after leaving AWP or rotating off the board, respectively.

AWP makes every effort to vary the judges by region, aesthetic, and institution so that writers, if ineligible one year, will certainly be eligible other years. If contestants win in any genre, they may not enter the competition again in the same genre for the next five consecutive years.

You may submit your manuscript to other publishers while it is under consideration by the Award Series, but you must withdraw your manuscript via Submittable if your manuscript is accepted elsewhere.

AWP cannot consider manuscript revisions during the course of the contest, but the winning authors will have an opportunity to revise their works before publication. Please read the entry requirements and guidelines carefully before submitting your work.

Winners will be announced on our website and via email in summer 2025.

Terms & Conditions

  • Your submitted manuscript must be an original work of which you are the sole author.

  • The decision of the judge is final. The judge may choose no winner if he or she finds no manuscript that, in their estimation, merits publication and the award.

  • Your manuscript must be submitted in accordance with the eligibility requirements, format guidelines, and entry requirements, or it will be disqualified.

  • No entry fees will be returned.

  • This competition is void where prohibited or restricted by law.

Manuscript Format Guidelines

Manuscripts must be typed and double-spaced. Poetry manuscripts may be single-spaced. Each manuscript must include a title page with the manuscript title only. If the author’s name appears anywhere on the manuscript, the submission will be disqualified. (For memoir, references to one’s self in the manuscript are fine, but make sure your name does not appear in headers, footers, title pages, or elsewhere.) Do not add a page with acknowledgment of previous publications or a biographical note. Please upload your manuscript to our submission system as a .doc, .docx, or .pdf file.

Entry Requirements

  • Please upload your manuscript to our submission system as a .doc, .docx, or .pdf file.

  • You will be required to remit an entry fee—$30 for nonmembers and $20 for AWP members—at the time of submission. All entry fees are nonrefundable. Students and faculty who have been registered by their program directors as members of AWP are eligible for the member fee. (Please note that if you are not an AWP member and submit to the member category, your submission will be disqualified).

  • You may enter in more than one genre, and you may also enter multiple manuscripts in one genre, provided that each manuscript is uploaded separately as an individual entry.

Deadline

Manuscripts must be uploaded by February 28, 2025.