API Contest 2025

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The theme for this contest is “Chromatic Dreams.” For more details on the contest prize, see below.

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This season, we invite you to explore how color has shaped your environment, language, culture, and creative processes. Take this boat with us to the island of Burano in the Venetian Lagoon. Board a plane to Vinicunca—a mountain in Cusco, Peru. Travel to the Frying Pan Lake, a hot spring in New Zealand. No matter what adventure you take, every landscape, city panorama, and country brings many questions about color. What role does color play in natural phenomena or historical artifacts? What color palettes do you notice in your life? How do color patterns harmonize or disrupt our worldview, sweep across the page, transform into another entity, and move onto another canvas?

Consider the meaning of “chromatic” in music composition. What color does your short story sound like—the rhythm, the texture, the lyrics? Dip your brush into unexplored questions, play with emotion and character, mix and match—what does violet summer look like? A canary winter? Give us monochrome or rainbow. Maybe you’ve derived “chromosomes” out of the word “chromatic.” Don’t be afraid to choreograph writing with “chronology,” “chromatography,” or “chromotherapy”—we want to hear all of your linguistic, scientific, and technological connections to color! Think about how you would dress a poem in an autumn sweater. Add a sprinkle of blue violin strings to a paragraph. Peer into your memories through a kaleidoscope. Don’t forget—you’re the artist, the musician, and the magician here. This is your opportunity to rewrite the universe.

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​The theme is open to your interpretation; be creative and have fun with it!

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Interested in honing your poetry-writing skills for the contest? Then try taking our poetry workshop, Around the World of Poetry in 80 Days. This workshop will help you to brainstorm, draft, and revise poems of your own!

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Interested in becoming an editor for Polyphony Lit? Take our editorial training course and join the staff!

 

Fall Contest Guidelines

• Submissions will open on September 1st and will remain open until October 31st or until we reach our submission cap of 200 submissions.

• Please note that this is a separate submission category from Polyphony Lit Volume 20.​ Submissions to Polyphony Lit Volume 20 will receive feedback from the editors, but for the seasonal contests, only the winning submissions will receive feedback from the judge.

• If you have already submitted your work to the Volume 20 category, then please do not send the same submission to the Fall Contest category.

• If you submit to the Fall Contest category first and your work is declined, then you may submit it to the Volume 21 category after the contest is finished.

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Writer Qualifications​

• High school students from anywhere in the world are eligible to submit.

• We do not accept submissions from editors who currently serve on the staff of Polyphony Lit.

• Submit a maximum of three pieces.

• If submitting multiple pieces, please upload as separate submissions. Multiple pieces submitted in a single document will be withdrawn, and you will be asked to resubmit your pieces separately.

• We accept simultaneous submissions and work that has been published elsewhere. If submitting previously published work, please send a message in Submittable noting where and when your work has been published, and if it is eligible for republication. If it is accepted for publication elsewhere after submitting to Polyphony Lit, please notify us immediately but do not withdraw your submission if you are still interested in publication at Polyphony Lit. If we accept a previously published submission for publication, we will acknowledge the place of the original publication.

• Previously published pieces are not eligible for the Claudia Ann Seaman Awards.

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Length

• Poetry must be 80 lines or less.

• Fiction and creative nonfiction must be 1,800 words or less.

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Formatting

• Do not put your name on the piece, as all work is blind juried.

• Submissions longer than one page should have the page number inserted at the top (right or left side) of every page, as it would help our Judge specify the location for their commentary.

• We accept submission in .doc, .docx or .rtf formats.

• We prefer common conventions:

  • Color: Black & white

  • Font Size: 12 pt throughout, including titles

  • Font Type: Times or Times New Roman

  • Margins: 1-inch at the top and bottom, and 1.25 inch at the left and right. One space after periods. There should be no extra returns after paragraphs unless you have a meaningful reason for the extra space.

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Using Submittable

• Please upload submissions through Submittable. We do not accept email submissions or hard copies via mail.

• Upload only one piece per submission file; to submit more than one piece, make more than one submission file.

• Submissions for this contest are free.

• There is a submission cap of 200 submissions, so we may close submissions for the contest before the deadline if we receive 200 submissions. We recommend submitting early, to ensure that you do not miss the deadline.

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Prize

There will be one winner and two finalists. The winners/finalists will receive:

• Publication in Polyphony Lit Volume 20

• Eligibility for the Claudia Ann Seaman Awards

• Editorial feedback from the Contest Judge

• Social media posts announcing the winners

• An honorary emblem next to the published work on the website

• A full scholarship for Polyphony Lit’s "How to be a Literary Editor" course. Upon completion of the course, students will be eligible to join the editorial staff of Polyphony Lit!

• Please note that only the three winners will receive feedback from the Judge.

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Additional Guidelines for Creative Nonfiction​

• At Polyphony Lit, we look for creative nonfiction pieces that are written in the style of short personal memoirs. We are looking for pieces that are informal, flexible in form, and most importantly, personal. Personal discovery is the keystone of a personal essay. Self-revelation, human experiences, humor, and flexibility of form are all aspects that we look for in pieces we publish as creative non-fiction.

• We do not look for op-ed pieces, critical analyses, research papers, or academic essays.

• We would advise reading some samples of our work, in order to understand the material that we publish. Here are some samples of creative nonfiction that we have published:

• Memories of the Boy I Didn't Know

• responses to love

• Holiday in a Burning City