Poetry / Prose Guidelines

Submission Cap

  Please note that we will be closing each window for Volume 21 whenever we reach the submission cap. We recommend submitting early to ensure your work is considered. What does this mean?

• The submission window for May 2026 - June 2026 may close before the end of June.
• The submission window for October 2026 - November 2026 may close before the end of November.
• The submission window for March 2027 - April 2027 may close before the end of April.

There will be a limited number of submissions, so out of respect for other submitters:

• Please submit no more than three submissions per volume.
• Please ensure your submission follows all guidelines, including word/line limits and guidelines for creative nonfiction (submissions that do not follow guidelines will be withdrawn).
• Please submit only if you are aged 14-18 (submissions from writers outside the age limit will be withdrawn).

Volume 22

Submissions for this category:

• will receive in-depth editorial feedback from our editors.
• will be evaluated for publication in our annual volume.
• are eligible for the Claudia Ann Seaman Awards.
• Submissions are free.

Writing Guidelines

Writer Qualifications​

• High school students (aged 14-18) from anywhere in the world are eligible to submit.
• Editors on Polyphony Lit's staff are not eligible to submit.
• Works must be written in English (unless contest guidelines specify otherwise).
• Original works only.
• Submit no more than three pieces per year (submission year begins in May and ends the following April)
• If submitting multiple pieces, please upload them 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 Multiple pieces submitted in a single document will be withdrawn, and you will be asked to resubmit your pieces separately.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

Length

• Poetry must be 80 lines or less.
• Fiction and creative nonfiction must be 1800 words or less.

Formatting​

• Do not put your name on the piece, as all work is blind juried.
• Poetry should be formatted flush left unless another format, such as centering, is an integral part of the piece's meaning.
• 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.

      

Using Submittable

• Please upload submissions through Submittable. We do not accept email submissions or hard copies via mail.
• If you submit a revision of a piece we have already reviewed, type "(REV)" after the title.​
• There is no fee to submit.
• By submitting to Polyphony Lit you give us permission to publish your piece as outlined by Polyphony Lit's Copyright Policies.

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:
• My Grandpa is a burst of Cyan Rain
• Mother, Tongue
• Scoville Scale

Additional Opportunities for Writers

• Interested in becoming an editor for Polyphony Lit? Take our editorial training course and join the staff!
• Interested in learning more about poetry from the best high school / college-aged writers and editors around the globe? Hone your poetry skills, learn about cultural perspectives on poetry, and receive detailed feedback from experienced Teaching Assistants in our poetry workshop.

Art Guidelines

Artist Qualifications​

• High school students (aged 14-18) from anywhere in the world are eligible to submit.
• For the art category, we welcome multiple submissions.

Artwork Guidelines​​

• Submitted artwork will be considered for the following categories: (1) Cover Art (which will appear both on the website and in print), and (2) Promotional Art (which will appear on social media, on our website, and in our online workshops).
• Images must be a .PNG or .JPG file.
• Images must be at least 2700 x 1800 pixels. Images with low resolution will not be eligible for cover art.
• Images must have a resolution of at least 300 DPI (dots per inch).
• Portrait orientation (6 x 9 inches or equivalent dimensions) is preferred.
• Polyphony means “many voices,” which you can use as inspiration for your design. You are not limited to that theme, as we are looking for the creativity and imagination of your visual art to be a match for the wide-ranging literary works contained in our annual volume.
• We accept simultaneous submissions but if the piece is accepted elsewhere, please notify us immediately. Only previously unpublished artwork is eligible.
• All submissions must be original and may include drawings, paintings, collages, photographs, or mixed media.

Using Submittable​

• In the submission form, please select "Cover Art" as the genre for your submission.
• 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.
• There is no fee to submit.
• We do not provide feedback on cover art submissions. If your piece is accepted for publication, we will notify you at the close of our submission cycle.
• Please note that submissions will remain open until May 31st 2026 and selections will be made around June 2026.
• If you are submitting visual art, you give us permission to publish your work as cover art, t-shirt art, or promotional art on Polyphony Lit's platforms as outlined by Polyphony Lit's Copyright Policies.

Poetry on Demand Team Applications

This is an open call for volunteer poets to join our poetry-writing team for the Poetry-on-Demand Summer 2026 fundraiser.

Our Poetry-on-Demand Team, comprised of teen poets from around the world, is eager to turn their creative talents into impact! The team writes street style poetry: spontaneous, short, minimally edited, and pleasing for Polyphony Lit patrons.

Each year we have three poem seasons: Summer Pop-Up (mid-June to mid-August), Holiday Pop-Up (late November to early-December) and Valentines Day Pop-Up (late January to early February).

We are looking for volunteer poets age 14-18 who want to join our team and write poems in response to prompts from our patrons, and students who are willing to help spread the word about the fundraiser to family, friends, and teachers. If you love improv and freewriting, or challenging yourself with new writing prompts, then you might be a good fit for our team!

Selected applicants will be invited to attend a 90-minute Zoom workshop with Guest Coach Eric Plattner on Tuesday  June 23, 2026 at 7pm EST, to learn how to write spontaneous "street poetry."

If we are able to collect over 30 poetry commissions during the Summer 2026 fundraiser then your work may be published in Polyphony Lit's Poetry-on-Demand chapbook. Our Summer 2025 chapbook was a huge success and we love showcasing our team's work, so we hope you might help us to reach our 30-poem goal!

For more information on the Poetry-on-Demand team and events, please visit our website.

The deadline to apply is June 9th, 2026.

We look forward to reviewing your application!

Japanese Heritage Contest 2026

May 1st - 31st 2026

  日本語訳

In celebration of Asian & Pacific Heritage Month, Polyphony Lit is hosting a special contest for submitters with Japanese background. The theme for the contest is Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself: Channeling Empowerment Through Japanese Culture. For more details on the prize, see below!

In his 1994 Nobel Prize acceptance speech “Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself,” Oe Kenzaburo discusses the ambiguities, margins, and intersections that constituted the Japanese identity during the turbulent decade. “What kind of identity as a Japanese should I seek?” he asks in his speech. “As one with a peripheral, marginal, and off-center existence in the world, I would like to seek how—with what I hope is a modest, decent, and humanist contribution—I can be of some use in a cure and reconciliation of mankind.” This disillusionment with Japanese society in the 1990s, as well as a strong emphasis on democracy and stronger diplomatic relations throughout Asia, make their way into his work—a reflection of the blur between his identity as a Japanese writer and his vision of what could be possible.

For API Month 2026, we’re holding this bonus contest to ask you about your own ambiguities. What intersections between your identity and the world around you remain vague? What questions about your heritage remain unanswered? How does your cultural background reconcile tensions and challenges you encounter? Polyphony Lit wants to see you write about culture as empowerment, change, and growth. Explore the undefined and show us what you discover. As you write, we encourage you to explore not only your cultural background but your style of writing, as well: you may take inspiration from Oe with “grotesque realism” prose, or Haruki Murakami’s surrealist style, or Kimiko Hahn’s evocative verse. There are no limits to the creative expression we seek from you.

We will accept pieces written in English and Japanese. If your piece is written primarily in one of these languages, but also features brief words or phrases written in another language, then we will certainly consider multilingual pieces like this, but please keep in mind that our contest readers will only be able to provide English translations for Japanese. For multilingual words and phrases, you are welcome to provide English translations of your own as footnotes or as part of the context in the piece.

Contest Guidelines

• Submissions will open on May 1st and will remain open until May 31st or until we reach our submission cap of 200 submissions.
• Please note that this is a separate submission category from Polyphony Lit Volume 22.​ Submissions to Polyphony Lit Volume 22 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 22 category, then please do not send the same submission to the contest category.
• If you submit to the contest category first and your work is declined, then you may submit it to the Volume 22 category after the contest is finished.

Writer Qualifications

• High school students aged 14-18 who identify as Japanese, Japanese American, or of Japanese heritage are eligible to submit. If you do not fall under these demographics, but are still interested in submitting to Polyphony Lit, then head over to our Volume 22 Prose and Poetry submissions category!
• We do not accept submissions from any editors who currently serve on the staff of Polyphony Lit.
• Works may be written in English or Japanese. If your piece is written primarily in one of these languages, but also features brief words or phrases written in another language, then we will certainly consider multilingual pieces like this, but please keep in mind that our contest readers will only be able to provide English translations for Japanese. For multilingual words and phrases, you are welcome to provide English translations of your own as footnotes or as part of the context in the piece.
• 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

Length

• Poetry must be 80 lines or less.
• Fiction and creative nonfiction must be 1,800 words or less.

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

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.

Prize

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

• Publication in Polyphony Lit Volume 22
• Eligibility for the Claudia Ann Seaman Awards
• Editorial feedback from the Contest Judge
• 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.

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

Asian & Pacific Islander Month Contest 2026

May 1st - 31st 2026

In celebration of Asian & Pacific Heritage Month, Polyphony Lit is hosting a special contest for submitters with Japanese background. The theme for the contest is "Borrowing." For more details on the prize, see below!

We live in an era where being API is an aestheticized identity to be borrowed, consumed, and discarded. With the rise of TikTok trends such as ‘Chinamaxxing’ — adopting Traditional Chinese Medicine wellness routines such as drinking hot water and eating congee — the threat and power of cultural commodification has never been so ubiquitous. A million views here, a million views there: it has become profitable for the Western gaze to confine Asian and Pacific Islander multiplicities, sometimes as blatantly as the one-dimensional Chester Ming in Hollywood blockbusters like The Wolf of Wall Street. Beneath this superficial adoption, however, a deeper, necessary borrowing serves as a touchstone of the Asian and Pacific Islander experience. 

For this contest, we invite you to explore the economy of borrowing. What may we borrow from our own cultures — the inherited griefs, the peripheries of a homeland we may have never seen, the tidbits of language passed down like heirlooms? Conversely, what do we borrow from other cultures? The artistic process, after all, is fundamentally a rite of borrowing until something new arises from the potpourri of inspiration. 

Take the poet Stephanie Chang, whose acclaimed poem “Lotus Flower Kingdom” in The Adroit Journal deftly weaves surrealistic inheritance and the bodily grotesque. Listen to the Cantonese rock band Beyond, whose luminous rock ballads borrow the revolutionary ardor of the South African anti-apartheid movement to mirror Hong Kong’s own mounting fears over the encroaching 1997 handover — “風雨中抱緊自由.” (Holding fast to freedom in the wind and rain) 

Bask in the expansive world of Pacific Islander literature – like Epeli Hauʻofa’s foundational essay Our Sea of Islands or the fierce, documentary poetics of Craig Santos Perez, which radically reclaim the inheritances of Oceania from colonial narratives. Turn to the hit animated film KPop Demon Hunters, which borrows from the Korean experience to make spectacle of it. Perhaps you will consider the myriad of loanwords in the Malay language, ranging from motosikal from English and kueh from Chinese, which borrow from Malaysia’s rich multiethnic history. 

What have you borrowed, what have you inherited, and what will you refuse to give back? The theme is entirely open to your interpretation – have fun with it!

Contest Guidelines

• Submissions will open on May 1st and will remain open until May 31st or until we reach our submission cap of 200 submissions.
• Please note that this is a separate submission category from Polyphony Lit Volume 22.​ Submissions to Polyphony Lit Volume 22 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 22 category, then please do not send the same submission to the contest category.
• If you submit to the contest category first and your work is declined, then you may submit it to the Volume 22 category after the contest is finished.

Writer Qualifications

• High school students age 14-18 who identify as Asian (Eg: Chinese, Filipino, Asian Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, etc) or Native Pacific Islander (Eg: Native Hawaiian, Samoan, Chamorro, Tongan, Fijian, Maori, etc) are eligible to submit. For ease of reference, we roughly define this as writers of Asian or Native Pacific Islander origin. However, we understand that people of Asian / Pacific descent are incredibly diverse and often come from many different backgrounds, so we hope that you will not be limited in any way by these categories. If you are not fall under these demographics, but still interested in writing about the theme, then feel free to submit to our Volume 22 submission category.
• We do not accept submissions from any editors who currently serve on the staff of Polyphony Lit.
• Works may be written in English or Mandarin. If your piece is written primarily in one of these languages, but also features brief words or phrases written in another language, then we will certainly consider multilingual pieces like this, but please keep in mind that our contest readers will only be able to provide English translations for the languages listed above. For multilingual words and phrases, you are welcome to provide English translations of your own as footnotes or as part of the context in the piece.
• Submit a maximum of three pieces.
• If submitting multiple pieces, please upload as separate submissions. Multiple pieces submitted in a single document may 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

Length

• Poetry must be 80 lines or less.
• Fiction and creative nonfiction must be 1,800 words or less.

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.

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.

Prize

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

• Publication in Polyphony Lit Volume 22
• Eligibility for the Claudia Ann Seaman Awards
• Editorial feedback from the Contest Judge
• 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.

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