APR/Honickman First Book Prize
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The prize of $3,000, with an introduction by the judge and distribution of the winning book by Copper Canyon Press through Consortium, will be awarded in 2027 with publication of the book in the same year. The author will receive a standard book publishing contract, with royalties paid in addition to the $3,000 prize. This year's final judge is poet Terrance Hayes.
Terrance Hayes’s newest books include a collection of poems, So To Speak (Penguin, 2023), a collection of essays, Watch Your Language (Penguin, 2023), American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018) and To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (Wave, 2018). To Float In The Space Between was winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism; American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin won the Hurston/Wright 2019 Award for Poetry. Hayes is a Silver Professor of English at New York University.
The prize is open to poets who have not published a book-length collection of poems with a registered ISBN. Poems previously published in journals or limited-edition chapbooks may be included in the manuscript, but the entire manuscript itself must not have been published as a book-length work. Translations are not eligible nor are works written by multiple authors. The editors of The American Poetry Review will screen manuscripts for the judge. APR complies with the CLMP Code of Ethics in the administration of this contest. The judge will select a manuscript in an anonymous review process and will not award the prize to any writer whose personal relationship to the judge poses a conflict of interest.
To be considered for the prize, submit a manuscript of 48 pages or more, paginated, with a table of contents and acknowledgments.
- Manuscripts must be received by October 1, 2026. The winning author and all other entrants will be notified by January 15, 2027.
- You may simultaneously submit your manuscript elsewhere, but please notify us immediately if it is accepted for publication. Submission of more than one manuscript is permissible; each must be entered separately.
- The winning author will have time to revise the manuscript after acceptance, but please send no revisions during the reading period.