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Michael Waters Poetry Prize

Michael Waters Poetry Prize

A prize of $6,000 and publication by SIR Press is awarded annually for a collection of poetry written in English. All entries are considered for publication.

Next deadline: February 1, 2027

Contest fee: $35

Marcus Wicker will judge.

Click here for complete guidelines.

The portal to upload digital submissions will open December 1, 2026. Printed submissions can be mailed at any time.

MarcuswickerwebMarcus Wicker was born in Ann Arbor and raised in Ypsilanti, Michigan. He is the author of three books of poetry: DEAR MOTHERSHIP (Ecco, 2026), Silencer (Mariner/Ecco, 2017)—winner of the Society of Midland Authors Award—and Maybe the Saddest Thing (Harper Perennial, 2012), selected by D.A. Powell for the National Poetry Series. A 2023 - 2024 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow, his honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Award, a Pushcart Prize, and Ruth Lilly Fellowship, as well as fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center, and Cave Canem. Wicker’s poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Oxford American, and POETRY. He founded the Memphis Writing Workshop, an open-door community space designed to provide adult poets and storytellers with opportunities for craft development and artistic fellowship. Marcus is a professor of English at the University of Memphis, where he teaches in the MFA program.

Michael Waters Poetry Prize collections are distributed by LSU Press.

Carl Phillips selected Jenna Johnson's New Stranger as winner of the 2026 Prize.

Click here for complete 2026 MWPP results.

Contest mailing address (for inquiries and print entries):
          Southern Indiana Review
          Michael Waters Poetry Prize
          University of Southern Indiana
          8600 University Boulevard
          Evansville, IN  47712

2026 MWPP Winner

JennajohnsonwebJenna Johnson received her MFA in Creative Writing from New York University and her bachelor’s in Creative Writing and English Literature from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in The Idaho Review, Colorado Review, The Penn Review, SurfGirl magazine, Rainy Day magazine, and Spectrum Literary Journal, among others.

Michael Waters Poetry Prize

The Michael Waters Poetry Prize was established in 2013 to honor Michael’s contributions to Southern Indiana Review and American arts and letters.

Michael Waters has written fifteen books of poetry, most recently Pagan Sky: New and Selected Poems 2000-2025 (Boa Editions, 2026), Sinnerman, Caw, The Dean of Discipline, and Celestial Joyride. He has co-edited several anthologies, including Border Lines: Poems of Migration, Reel Verse: Poems About the Movies, Contemporary American Poetry, and Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali. His poems have appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Kenyon Review, and Rolling Stone. He is the recipient of five Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright Foundation, and New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Waters lives without a cell phone in Ocean, New Jersey.

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