Slope Editions 20th Annual Book Prize

Judged by Ariana Reines

Submission Guidelines

Slope Editions is accepting full-length poetry manuscripts for its 20th Annual Slope Editions Book Prize Contest. This year's contest will be judged by Ariana Reines. The deadline is April 1st, 2025. The winning poet will have their book of poems published in 2026 by Slope Editions and will receive $1000 and free copies of the book in lieu of royalties. The winner will be announced in the summer of 2025. Entries will be read blind. Slope values diversity in poetry and we encourage underrepresented poets to submit. 

About the Judge:

Ariana Reines is a poet, playwright, and performing artist from Salem, Massachusetts and based in New York. Her books include A Sand Book (2019), winner of the 2020 Kingsley Tufts Award and longlisted for the National Book Award, Mercury, Coeur de Lion, and The Cow, which won the Alberta Prize from Fence in 2006. Her Obie-winning play Telephone was commissioned by The Foundry Theatre with a sold-out run at the Cherry Lane Theatre in 2009. Reines has created performances for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Swiss Institute, Stuart Shave/Modern Art, Le Mouvement Biel/Bienne, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Performance Space New York. She has taught poetry at UC Berkeley (Holloway Poet), Columbia, NYU, and Scripps College (Mary Routt Chair), been a visiting critic at Yale School of Art, and for community organizations including the Poetry Project and Poets House. Her poetry and prose have been published in The New Yorker, Poetry, Artforum, Frieze, Harper’s, and others. In 2020, while a Divinity student at Harvard, Reines created Invisible College, an online space devoted to the study of poetry, sacred texts, and the arts.

Eligibility:

Any poet living in the US and writing in English is eligible, unless that person has a close personal or professional relationship with the judge and/or Slope Editions staff or an affiliation with the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Past or current students of the judge are ineligible to enter; entry fees will be returned in these cases. Any manuscript that has appeared or is forthcoming as a printed book, e-book, or chapbook will NOT be considered. This means we will not accept manuscripts that contain a substantial amount of work previously published in a chapbook. Please do not include your name or any personal information anywhere on the manuscript. Manuscripts that are not blinded will not be read.

Electronic Submission Guidelines:

40 to 90 pages as formatted in standard 8 &1/2 by 11 MS Word or PDF document submitted through Submittable. Your name should not appear anywhere within your manuscript. Please include a title page with book title only, a table of contents, and an acknowledgements page with manuscript.

Entry Fee:

$25 for electronic submissions, paid via Submittable.

Deadline:

April 1st, 2025

Revisions:

The winner may be able to revise their manuscript before publication. No revisions will be considered during the reading period.

Submissions to the Slope Editions Book Prize may also be considered for additional Slope Editions publications. Entrants being considered for these publications will be notified. We offer sincere thanks to all entrants and readers for supporting Slope Editions and small press poetry.