Naugatuck River Review’s Fifth Annual NARRATIVE POETRY CONTEST will be judged by Susan Deer Cloud. Please read the guidelines below BEFORE submitting your work.

First prize is $1000 and publication in NRR
Second prize $250 and publication in NRR
Third prize of  $100 and publication in NRR
Contest submissions will be open from July 1 – Sept. 1  at midnight

GUIDELINES: READ THIS BEFORE SUBMITTING
Please do not put your name anywhere on your poems. Register with Submission Manager or log in to submit. Submit no more than three (3) unpublished poems, all in one .doc, .docx or .rtf file. The contest fee of $20 includes a copy (pdf to all submitters, print to contributors) of the journal, and is our primary source of funding for both the contest and publication/shipping costs. Simultaneous submissions are not recommended for the contest. Make sure your poems are NARRATIVE, that is they tell a story or have an element of story. Lyric poems that are not narrative will be disqualified. Poems longer than 50 lines will be disqualified.  If your name is all over your poems, we may become annoyed because we have to take your name off before sending them to our readers. You don’t want to annoy us. Good luck!
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Judge for this year’s Contest is  Susan Deer Cloud:

Susan Deer Cloud is the author of five books of poems, most recently Borscht Belt Indian, New and Selected and Braiding Starlight. She has edited a multicultural anthology, Confluence. Her work has been published in journals such as Rosebud, Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review and in anthologies including Sister Nations.She has received a fellowship from New York State Foundation for the Arts.

Love to read great narrative poetry?
Please consider a SUBSCRIPTION to Naugatuck River Review. Only $20 brings you two beautiful and delightful issues of the journal, filled with great narrative poetry. Go to SUBSCRIBE on the button above and order through Paypal or send a check to our P.O. Box. We will also accept donations. Thanks so much to all our poets and readers!

This is a literary journal founded in order to publish and in doing so to honor good narrative poetry. Naugatuck River Review is dedicated to publishing narrative poetry in the tradition of great narrative poets such as Gerald Stern, Philip Levine or James Wright. We are open to many styles of poetry, looking for narrative that sings, which means the poem has a strong emotional core and the narrative is compressed.  We publish twice a year, Winter and Summer.

Winners will be published in the Winter 2014 Issue 11 of Naugatuck River Review.

All poems will be considered for publication.

Naugatuck River Review subscribes to the principles laid out in the Contest Code of Ethics adopted by the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP):

CLMP’s community of independent literary publishers believes that ethical contests serve our shared goal: to connect writers and readers by publishing exceptional writing. We believe that intent to act ethically, clarity of guidelines, and transparency of process form the foundation of an ethical contest. To that end, we agree to:

1. conduct our contests as ethically as possible and to address any unethical behavior on the part of our readers, judges, or editors;
2. to provide clear and specific contest guidelines—defining conflict of interest for all parties involved; and
3. to make the mechanics of our selection process available to the public.

This Code recognizes that different contest models produce different results, but that each model can be run ethically. We have adopted this Code to reinforce our integrity and dedication as a publishing community and to ensure that our contests contribute to a vibrant literary heritage.