An award for a single poem

Poetry Quarterly has published poetry four times a year since 2009. Once a year, we give one poem the Rebecca Lard Award. The contest is open to poets everywhere, at any point in their writing life, and the current cycle accepts entries through December 2027.

Entries go through the same submissions manager we use for our regular issues. Judging is done by our editor, Glenn Lyvers, unless a guest judge is named for the year. He reads every submission to the journal personally, and contest entries are no exception. There is no first-round screener deciding whether your poem reaches the person who matters.

What the winner receives

• A $500 gift certificate to the Prolific Press Bookstore
• Publication of the winning poem in the prize-winner issue
• A feature on the back cover of that issue
• A feature here on the Poetry Quarterly website
• Free entry into the following year’s contest
• One free print copy of the prize-winner issue

The winning poem gets a life in three places: the printed issue, the back cover, and this website, where past winners stay free for anyone to read. Francis Flavin’s 2020 winner, for instance, ran in the Spring 2021 issue and can still be read here today, reproduced exactly as it looked in print.

What every entrant receives

The entry fee is $20 per poem, or $10 for patrons, who may also enter up to six poems per issue instead of three. Every poet who enters receives a one-year subscription to Poetry Quarterly Online, a $20 value, which opens all 47 back issues of the journal. The free year applies to new and inactive subscribers; current members already have full access.

In plain terms: the fee buys a chance at the prize, and the journal comes with it. If you want to know what we publish before you enter, here is what a subscription includes.

Who was Rebecca Lard?

The award is named for Rebecca Hammond Lard (1772–1855). She was born March 7, 1772, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and taught school in Vermont from the age of fourteen until her marriage to Samuel Lard in 1801. Her husband went west to Indiana ahead of her; encouraged by her son, she eventually followed with her children and settled there.

In Indiana she wrote the long poem On the Banks of the Ohio, published as a booklet in 1823 and picked up by magazines and papers of the day. It is considered the first book of poetry to come out of Indiana, and critics have called Lard the state’s first poet. An earlier collection, Miscellaneous Poems on Moral and Religious Subjects, had appeared in 1820, printed in Woodstock, Vermont, under the byline “a Lady.” Her poems were mostly religious and meditative, and they owed something to Virgil’s Bucolics and Georgics.

She wrote at a time when American women rarely published under their own names, and she kept sending her work out anyway, for decades. The award carries her name as a nod to that persistence.

Past winners

Every winning poem is reproduced on this site as it appeared in the printed journal. Click a title to read it.

• 2020 · Francis Flavin · “Rain in Pampanga”
• 2019 · Arvilla Fee · “Where the Lost Things Go”
• 2018 · David Anthony Sam · “First and Last”
• 2017 · Suzanne Cottrell · “Spiritual Awakening”
• 2016 · Patricia Rossi · “Robin’s Egg”
• 2015 · Scott Ruescher · “At the Intersection”
• 2014 · Jackie Maugh Robinson · “Spaces”
• 2013 · Joan I. Siegel · “On the Night Train to Marseilles”
• 2012 · Shann Ray · “The Hunter’s Son”
• 2011 · Nancy Kassell · “Wild Type”
• 2010 · Susan Davis · “The Season Begins in a Waiting Room”

The most recent award went to Francis Flavin in 2020. The next will be given for the 2027 cycle, which is open now.

How to enter

Submit your poem through the Poetry Quarterly submissions manager. Entries for the current cycle are accepted through December 2027. Full contest details, including fees and everything that comes with your entry, are on the contests page.

Questions about the award? Write to editor@poetryquarterly.com.