Pride Contest 2025

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The theme for this contest is “Reclamation and Reverie.” For more details on the contest prize, see below.

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Queer stories have long been hidden, erased, or altered to fit a more palatable narrative. With art, people have the power to reclaim what once was and what will continue to be. Here, villainized identities, silenced histories, and fractured truths can transcend to something stronger and more authentic.

 

Tasked of you is to reconceive what may have been taken– thoughts suppressed and actions shamed. Embrace reverie as an inherently queer act: a space of daydreams, fantasies, and inner worlds where everyone is encouraged to live loudly. Find rebellion in your reclamation, and a new resolve in your imagined futures, your rewritten records, your desperate legitimacy.

 

You may consider queer suppression across history, from ancient times to modern media. Whether you draw inspiration from the lives of queer figures like Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, or Frida Kahlo, or from broader historical moments, such as protests or dehumanizing laws, find a voice that is distinctly your own. Ask yourself: how has your reverie been broken, and how might you reclaim it? That, at its core, is what this theme invites.

 

Do not be afraid to be too much or say too much. For millennia, the queer community has been criticized for its strangeness. It is now that we must embrace it– the weird, the non-conforming, the odd– and it is now that we must shape it into eternity. Make this theme your own: be gentle or fiery, cautious or revolutionary. But always, be everything you were told you could not be.​

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

 

Pride Contest Guidelines

• Submissions will open on June 1st and will remain open until June 30th 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 Pride Contest category.

• If you submit to the Pride 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 who identify as LGBTQIA+ are eligible to submit. We understand that the LGBTQIA+ community covers a wide spectrum of identities, so we hope that you will not be limited by this term in any way. If you do not fall under these demographics, you are still welcome to submit to our upcoming seasonal contests. A new slate of contests will open in July 2025.

• 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 21

• Eligibility for the Claudia Ann Seaman Awards

• Editorial feedback from the Contest Judge

• 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