Brittingham/Pollak Deadline: September 15, 2025
Translation Prize Deadline: November 8, 2025

Submissions to the Wisconsin Poetry Series are now open! Any poet with an original, full-length collection is eligible for the 41st annual Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry, judged by Airea D. Matthews. Each manuscript, accompanied by a $28 reading fee, will be considered for both prizes. Each winner will receive $1,500 and publication through the University of Wisconsin Press. At least three additional applicants will also be offered publication.

For the fourth time this year, we are also accepting submissions to the Wisconsin Prize for Poetry in Translation, judged by Daniel Borzutzky and awarding $1,500 plus publication. Translators or original authors are invited to submit a full-length collection of poetry translated into English. Applicants to the translation prize will be asked to confirm they have permission for English translation and publication of the work, by its author(s) and the executor(s) of any active copyright(s). Submissions must be accompanied by a $28 reading fee.

Manuscript Requirements:

• For the Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prizes, the author's name and contact info should not appear anywhere on the document. Please assemble a single pdf including a title page, a table of contents, the manuscript poems, and (optionally) an acknowledgments page listing any magazines or journals where the submitted poems may have first appeared. Manuscripts should be 50 to 90 pages in length on 8.5" x 11" pdf pages.
• For the Wisconsin Prize for Poetry in Translation, the name of the translator and original author should appear on the title page of the document. Please assemble a single pdf including a title/author page, a table of contents, the manuscript poems, 50-to-250-word bios for each original author and translator, a project statement up to 500 words in length, and (optionally) an acknowledgments page listing any magazines or journals where the submitted translations may have first appeared. Manuscripts must include each poem in both its original language and in English translation, comprising 75 to 150 total pages in length, on 8.5" x 11" pdf pages.

This Year's Judges:

Airea D. Matthews is the author of two prizewinning poetry collections: Simulacra (2017), which received the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and Bread and Circus (2023), a memoir in verse contending with the realities of class and race, which was awarded the 2024 LA Times Book Prize in Poetry. Matthews is the recipient of a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, a 2020 Pew Fellowship, and the 2017 Margaret Walker For My People award. In 2016, she received both the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, POETRY, Poetry Ireland, The New York Times, Georgia Review, Callaloo, Gulf Coast, Best American Poetry, Tin House, Los Angeles Review of Books, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Matthews is an associate professor and co-chair of the creative writing department at Bryn Mawr College.

Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and Spanish-language translator from Chicago. His most recent books are The Murmuring Grief of the Americas (2024), and Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 (2021). His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human, received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent translations are Cecilia Vicuña’s The Deer Book (2024); and Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto's Valdivia received the American Literary Translator’s Association’s 2017 National Translation Award, and he has also translated collections by Raúl Zurita, and Jaime Luis Huenún. He teaches in English and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago.