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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