Ashland Poetry Press is excited to announce our second annual Poetry Broadside Contest, open in the fall of 2024.

2025 Submission Guidelines

● Submission period: September 1 to November 1, 2025

● One entry = one to two unpublished poems. (Each poem will be judged individually; not as a pair.)

● Electronic submissions only, via Submittable, $10 per entry. 

● Multiple submissions are welcome, but a new fee is required for each entry.

● Poems should be 40 lines or fewer to accommodate the page (including spaces between stanzas).

● Please keep poems anonymous on the page.

● Please do not send fully designed broadsides; only poems.

● Ashland University graduates or past students of Poetry Press director Chuck Carlise or judge Marcelo Hernandez Castillo should not submit. 

First place receives:

● $250 and 50 printed copies of their winning broadside (as well as the digital original)

Two runners-up receive:

● 25 printed copies of their winning broadside (as well as the digital original)

Judge

The 2024 contest will be judged by poet Marcelo Hernandez Castillo.

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is the author of Children of the Land: a Memoir (Harper Collins); Cenzontle (BOA Editions), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. prize; Dulce (Northwestern University Press), winner of the Drinking Gourd Prize; and, most recently, he is the co-editor of the anthology Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented  Diaspora (Harper Perennial). He is the 2025 guest editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review and has also curated the Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day Series. His work has been long listed for the California Book Award, the Foreword Indies Prize, and the Lambda Literary Award, among other recognitions.

He was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan and co-founded the Undocupoets, which eliminated citizenship requirements from all major poetry book prizes in the U.S., and for which he was recognized with the Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers award.

He currently serves as faculty in the MFA program at St. Mary’s College of California and at Ashland University’s Low-Res MFA program.

  Other important details:

Winning broadsides will again be designed by poet and artist Lindsay Lusby.  (Here are some samples of her work.)

All entrants to the contest entrants will receive a 50% discount on each of the three winning broadsides.

Winners will be announced in January, and the winning broadsides will be available for purchase at AWP in Baltimore (March 

-7) as well as on our website (www.ashlandpoetrypress.com).