Announcing the 2024-2025 Diann Blakely Visiting Poet & National Poetry Competition

The Creative Writing Program of the University of Georgia is happy to announce that the 2024-2025 Diann Blakely National Poetry Competition for Emerging Poets is open for submissions. This year’s contest will be judged by Vivek Narayanan, the 2024-2025 Diann Blakely Visiting Poet. 

A $500 prize will be awarded for an English-language poem of less than 50 lines written by a poet who has not yet published a full-length poetry collection. The winning poem will be preserved digitally as part of the Diann Blakely Archive at UGA. 

Please note that previously published work and work currently submitted for publication elsewhere is ineligible. To ensure that entries will be judged blindly, poetry submissions should have no identifying information in the poem or file name.

Anyone currently affiliated with the University of Georgia as student or employee is ineligible to participate. Friends, relatives, colleagues, and current or former students of the judge are also ineligible.

Previous winners of the contest should wait three years before entering again.

View Details + Submit Your Poem

Vivek Narayanan’s most recent books of poems are After (New York Review Books / HarperCollins India, 2022) and The Kuruntokai and its Mirror (Hanuman Editions, 2024).  His work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry. He has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute and at the New York Public Library and teaches in the MFA Poetry program at George Mason University. (Illustration of Vivek Narayanan by Deepankar Gohain)