How to Choose Which Poetry Contests to Enter
Quick answer: How to choose which poetry contests to enter: a working poet's vetting framework covering legitimacy, fees, odds, judge fit and timing, with a checklist.
Somewhere on your desk, or in a folder named something like Final_final_v3, sits a poem you believe in. The question is not whether to send it out but where. Type poetry contest into any search bar and you will meet hundreds of options: some run by respected journals, some by universities, some by outfits whose entire business model is your entry fee. Choosing badly costs you money, time, and worse, the first-publication rights of a poem that deserved a better home. Choosing well is a learnable skill, and it has almost nothing to do with luck.
Experienced poets do not enter more contests than beginners. They enter better ones. They run a quick vetting pass before a poem ever leaves the house, and they match each poem to a contest the way a tailor matches cloth to a customer. This page gives you that vetting framework: how to check legitimacy in ten minutes, how to read the odds honestly, when a fee is fair and when it is fleecing, and how to judge fit so your strongest work lands in front of readers likely to love it.
The straight answer
Enter contests that pass four tests: the organiser is real and findable, the terms are published and sane, the fee (if any) is proportionate to the prize and the service, and the contest's taste matches the poem you are sending. If a contest fails any one of the four, skip it. There will be another next month, and there is no prize worth handing a good poem to a bad operator.
Notice what is missing from that list: prestige. Prestige matters eventually, but a small honest contest that publishes winners, names its judges or its judging criteria, and pays what it promises will do more for a developing poet than a famous prize with ten thousand entrants. Credits compound. A record of placements in transparent, well-run contests is what convinces editors, and yourself, that the work is travelling.
The ten-minute legitimacy check
Before you read a single past winner or theme, establish that the contest actually exists as a functioning operation. This takes about ten minutes and filters out most of the trouble. You are looking for a track record you can verify without taking anyone's word for it.
Run through these checks in order, and stop the moment one fails:
Odds and fees, read honestly together
Contests rarely publish entry numbers, but you can estimate. A free contest attached to a large platform may draw thousands of entries; a themed contest from a small regional journal might draw two hundred. Neither figure should decide for you alone, but it should shape expectations. The useful mental shift is to stop asking can I win and start asking what do I get if I don't. A contest that gives every entrant a score, feedback, or publication consideration returns value at any placement. Writory's monthly contest, for instance, scores every single entry on creativity, emotion, structure, language and theme, which means even a poem that places nowhere comes back with a map of its weak walls. Contests that return nothing but silence to 99 percent of entrants need a much bigger prize to justify the same fee.
And fees themselves are not automatically a scam. Reading takes labour, prizes need funding, and many respected journals run fee-charging contests as their main fundraiser. The honest question is proportion: a modest fee supporting a named prize, published winners and a functioning magazine is a fair trade, while a fee exceeding a cinema ticket for an anonymous judge and a prize of exposure is not. A rough rule that serves most poets well: the total prize pool should be many multiples of the entry fee, the organiser should offer something beyond the prize (publication, feedback, scores, a print issue), and free entry should be your default while you build a track record. Set a monthly ceiling for contest spending and never break it for fear of missing out. Contests recur. Rent does not wait.
Fit: match the poem to the table
A brilliant poem in the wrong contest loses to an average poem in the right one. Every contest has a taste, whether or not it admits it, and the fastest way to learn that taste is to read what it has rewarded before. If the last three winners were spare free-verse meditations on grief and you are about to send a rhyming comic ballad, you are not brave, you are mis-addressed.
Fit also means matching the poem's stage to the contest's stakes. A poem you finished last week has no business at a major prize; it has not survived enough rereadings. Send new work to low-stakes, fast-turnaround contests first, learn from how it performs, then promote the survivors to bigger stages. Think of it as a league system: poems earn promotion.
A vetting checklist you can run before every entry
Here is the whole framework compressed into a pass you can run in one sitting. Print it, or keep it in the same folder as your poems. If a contest scores well on all seven, enter with a clear conscience.
Traps and time-wasters
The classic trap is the anthology scheme: everyone wins, and the prize is the chance to buy the expensive book your poem appears in. Closely related are contests whose fine print claims sweeping rights to every entry, winners or not, and prizes of exposure to audiences that turn out to be a dormant social media account. Watch also for contests with no named humans anywhere, fees that quietly exceed the advertised prize once currency conversion is done, and endless deadline extensions, which usually mean entry numbers, not generosity, are driving the calendar.
None of these will announce themselves. All of them fail the ten-minute check above, which is the point of running it every time, even for contests that look established.
A realistic first step this week
Pick the one finished poem you trust most. Find three contests currently open: one free, one small and fee-charging, one aspirational. Run all three through the checklist, discard any that fail, and submit to the best remaining fit before the week ends. One well-vetted entry teaches you more about this process than a month of browsing listings ever will.
What poets can take from this
- Keep a simple log of every entry: contest, poem, fee, deadline, result, so patterns emerge over months.
- Default to free-entry contests until placements start arriving, then add modest fees selectively.
- Read at least two past winning poems before paying any contest anything.
- Never enter the same unrevised poem twice into the same contest series; revise between attempts.
- Set a fixed monthly contest budget and treat it like any other bill.
- If the rights clause confuses you, ask the organiser to explain it in plain words; silence is your answer.
Try it yourself
Write a poem addressed to a judge you will never meet, telling them exactly what your poem is worth, without using the words prize, win, or contest.
Questions
Are poetry contests with entry fees legitimate?
Many are, especially those run by established journals and universities where fees fund the prize and the magazine. The fee itself is not the red flag; the missing track record is. Check for named organisers, published past winners and plain rights language before paying anything.
How many poetry contests should I enter per month?
Quality of targeting beats volume. One to three well-matched entries a month, each vetted and each sent to a contest whose past winners resemble your work, will outperform scattergun submissions. Keep a log so you can see what is actually working.
Should beginners enter big prestigious poetry prizes?
Usually not yet. Major prizes draw enormous fields and give no feedback, so a loss teaches you nothing. Start with smaller contests that publish results quickly or return scores, build placements, and promote your strongest surviving poems upward over time.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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