Brittingham/Pollak Deadline: September 15, 2024
Translation Prize Deadline: November 7, 2024

Submissions to the Wisconsin Poetry Series are now open! Any poet with an original, full-length collection is eligible for the 40th Annual Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry, judged by the Founding Editor of the Wisconsin Poetry Series, Ronald Wallace. 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 third time this year, we are also accepting submissions to the Wisconsin Prize for Poetry in Translation, judged by Idra Novey 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:

Ron Wallace, the Founding Editor of the Wisconsin Poetry Series, has come out of retirement to judge the 40th Annual Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry. He is Felix Pollak Professor of Poetry, Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His twenty books and chapbooks include Long for This World: New and Selected Poems, and For Dear Life: Poems. He divides his time between Madison and a forty-acre farm in Bear Valley, Wisconsin. 

Idra Novey will judge the Wisconsin Prize for Poetry in Translation. She is a novelist, poet, and translator. Her novel Take What You Need was a New York Times Notable Book of 2023 and named a Best Book of the Year with The New Yorker, L.A. Times, Boston Globe, NPR, Today, and Yiyun Li's Author Pick at The Guardian. Her first novel Ways to Disappear was a finalist for the L.A. Times First Fiction Prize and winner of the 2016 Brooklyn Public Library Prize and the Sami Rohr Prize. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into a dozen languages and she’s written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. In 2022, she received a Pushcart Prize for her story "The Glacier" published in The Yale Review.

Novey’s works as a translator include Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. and a co-translation with Ahmad Nadalizadeh of Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian, Lean Against This Late Hour, a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Prize in 2021. She teaches in Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program. 

Her first book of poems in a decade, Soon and Wholly, is forthcoming in September 2024.