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Naugatuck River Review submissions have closed for the 11th annual contest.

Submissions for Naugatuck River Review’s 11th annual Narrative Poetry Contest are now closed.  Our judge this year is Lauren K. Alleyne. Winners will be posted here and on the Naugatuck River Review Facebook site by the end of November.
Our winter open submission period is Jan 1 – March 1, 2019

Guidelines are below and on the Submittable site. Please read them over carefully before submitting your work. More contest info is on our Contest page.

Submissions for the 11th Narrative Poetry Contest were open July 1 – September 1. Our judge this year is Lauren K. Alleyne. First prize is $1000 for one poem, second prize is $250 and third prize is $100. The submission fee of $20 goes towards the publication of the journal, contributor mailings, publicity, and the prizes. All winners, finalists and semi-finalists will be published in the winter/spring 2020 issue of NRR.
Lauren K. Alleyne is the author of two collections of poetry, Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press 2014), and Honeyfish (New Issues & Peepal Tree, 2019). Her work has appeared in numerous publications including The Atlantic, Ms. Muse, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Interviewing the Caribbean, The Crab Orchard Review, among many others. Recent honors for her work include a 2017 Phillip Freund Alumni Prize for Excellence in Publishing (Cornell University), the 2016 Split This Rock Poetry Prize, and a Picador Guest Professorship in Literature (University of Leipzig, Germany, 2015). She is currently Assistant Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and an Associate Professor of English at James Madison University. More about her at www.laurenkalleyne.com.
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WHAT IS NARRATIVE POETRY?
We get this question quite often. What NRR is looking for are poems that tell a story, or have a strong sense of story. They can be stories of a moment or an experience, and can be personal or historical. A good narrative poem that would work for our journal has a compressed narrative, and we prefer poems that take up two pages or less of the journal (50 lines max). We are looking above all for poems that are well-crafted, have an excellent lyric quality and contain a strong emotional core. Any style of poem is considered, including prose poems. Poems with very long lines don’t fit well in the format. Hope this helps

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Naugatuck River Review Contest info

Naugatuck River Review contest SUBMISSIONS ARE CURRENTLY CLOSED. Our next submission period is open submissions from January 1 – March 1 for the summer/fall 2020 issue.Thank you to everyone who submitted to our 10th narrative poetry contest. 
LIST OF WINNERS, FINALISTS, SEMI-FINALISTS:

First Prize:
Torrin Greathouse:  “Ode to the First Time I Wore a Dress & My Mother Did Not Flinch”

Second Prize:
Scott Hutchison: “Skeleton in the Bittersweet”

Third Prize:
Samuel Piccone: “A History of Marriage”

Finalists:
Ruth Bavetta: “The Radio”
Anne Bower: “Swans on the line”
David Bublitz: “Tafsir”
Aaron Caycedo-Kimura: “Five minutes on High”
Kathleen Corcoran: “No word for snow”
Robert Eastwood: “To Be Dutiful”
Suzanne Edison: “Shipping Remains”
Donna O’Connell Gilmore: “Allegany County”
Jeanne Julian: “Widow’s Walk”
J. Adams Lagana: “Letter to Stephen, Regarding That Night in April”
Eve Linn: “The selling of Manhattan”
Terry Lucas: “A Small Pebble”
Jayne Marek: “Alarm”
David Meischen: “Self-Portrait with Altar Boy”
Lawrence O’Brien: “My Aunt, Spinoza, the Nazis, and Spring”
Margaret Stawowy: “Halfway to Hell”
Claire Zoghb: “Return”

Semi-Finalists:
Jacob Appel: “Barberism”
Alan Bern: “Sway”
Laura Foley: “Tulips for Parkland”
Dianna Henning: “From the Northeast Kingdom”
Carine Topal: “A Lamenting”
Jacquelyn Malone: “The Limits of Memory”
Beth Paulson: “Land that Moves Back and Forth”
Don Schofield: “Eternal Adolescence”
David Sullivan: “Om Mani Padme Hum”
Martin Willitts Jr.: “Night Hawks”

Contest Judge:

Allison Joseph lives in Carbondale, Illinois, where she is Professor of English and  Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Southern Illinois University.  She serves as poetry editor of Crab Orchard Review.  Her books and chapbooks include What Keeps Us Here (Ampersand Press), Soul Train (Carnegie Mellon University Press), In Every Seam (University of Pittsburgh Press), Worldly Pleasures (Word Tech Communications), Imitation of Life (Carnegie Mellon UP), Voice: Poems (Mayapple Press), My Father’s Kites(Steel Toe Books), Trace Particles (Backbone Press), Little Epiphanies (NightBallet Press), Mercurial (Mayapple Press), Mortal Rewards (White Violet Press), Multitudes (Word Poetry), The Purpose of Hands (Glass Lyre Press), Double Identity (Singing Bone Press) Corporal Muse (Sibling Rivalry Press, forthcoming) and What Once You Loved (Barefoot Muse Press). Her most recent full-length collection, Confessions of a Barefaced Woman was published by Red Hen Press in June 2018. She is the literary partner and wife of poet and editor Jon Tribble.
GUIDELINES:
PLEASE READ THE GUIDELINES BELOW BEFORE SUBMITTING.

We accept ELECTRONIC SUBMISSIONS ONLY through Submittable twice a year. Our contest submission period is July 1 – Sept. 1. The contest fee of $20 (per 3 poem submission) will be accepted. Unpaid submissions will be disqualified. Emailed submissions and mailed submissions will not be considered.
The open submission period is from Jan. 1 – March 1 and there is no fee.

Please submit no more than 3 unpublished NARRATIVE poems of no more than 50 lines per poem in ONE MSWord file (.doc or .docx or .rtf only, no .pdf please). Please remove your name from your file, as the poetry is read blind by our editorial staff and contest judge. Questions ONLY: Feel free to email us at naugatuckriver@aol.com.

All poems will be considered for publication. Winners (3) will receive prize money and all finalists and semi-finalists will be rewarded with a copy of the journal.

Multiple submissions are discouraged, but simultaneous submissions are fine as long as you inform us in a timely manner if your work is published elsewhere. We claim first North American publication rights, so rights revert to the author after the initial publication period, just please give us credit.  We will only consider work that has not been previously published. All poems will be blind-read. Member CLMP.

A link to submit will be here during submission periods.