The Auburn Witness Poetry Prize | Win $1000
Call for Submissions: The 2025 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize
Submission Window: May 1 – June 1
Prize: $1,000 + Publication + Travel to Auburn University
The Southern Humanities Review is now accepting submissions for the 2025 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, a $1,000 award that celebrates poems of witness and honors the legacy of the late poet Jake Adam York. This year’s judge is the acclaimed poet and editor Nicole Sealey.
Sealey, author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure and Ordinary Beast, brings a wealth of experience and a powerful voice to this year’s prize. Her work has earned the OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, a NAACP Image Award nomination, and the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.
The prize includes:
- A $1,000 award
- Publication in Southern Humanities Review
- A public reading and conversation with Nicole Sealey at the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art
- Travel expenses to attend the Auburn event in October 2025
All entrants receive a copy of Southern Humanities Review featuring the winning poems.
What the Judges are Looking For
Submit up to three previously unpublished poems of witness. Think work that engages with pressing social issues, shines a light on overlooked histories, or offers a voice where silence once reigned. Your poem should do what all great poems of witness do—reckon with the past, illuminate the present, and open new doors to understanding.
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Submission Guidelines for the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize
- Submission period: May 1 to June 1, 2025
- Submit via Submittable
- Entry fee: $15 USD
- Submit up to three poems
- No personal info on poem pages (blind submission)
- Include a brief cover letter in Submittable (not on the poems)
Simultaneous submissions are welcome. You may withdraw your piece if it is accepted elsewhere (you’ll still receive the issue of SHR).
Results will be announced in August.
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Eligibility Requirements for the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize.
The contest is open to all, with the following exceptions:
- Friends, relatives, or former students of Nicole Sealey or SHR staff are ineligible.
- Current/former SHR staff or Auburn University employees and students are not eligible.
- Auburn undergrad alumni who graduated before June 2014 may apply.
- Previous first-place winners cannot re-enter, but finalists and runners-up are welcome back.
This prize pays tribute to Jake Adam York, a fifth-generation Alabamian and Auburn alum, whose work fiercely and tenderly grappled with race, history, and memory in the American South. His poetry remains a call to remember, reckon, and rebuild.
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Submit your poems between May 1 and June 1, and join a tradition of writers committed to bearing witness. Visit Southern Humanities Review for full contest details.
