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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 3, 2025.

Entry fee: $35 (Thanks to a donation from the Mary C. Mohr family, currently enrolled grad students receive a 50% entry fee discount.)

Monica Youn will judge.

Click here for complete guidelines.

Click here to upload your MWPP 2025 entry.

Monica Youn is the author of From From, which was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award in Poetry; Blackacre, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America; Ignatz, a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award in Poetry; and Barter.

Fady Joudah selected Nichole Lachat's The Red We Silk as winner of the 2024 Prize.

Click here for complete 2024 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

2024 MWPP Winner

Nicole Lachat was born in Edmonton, Canada, to a Peruvian mother and Swiss father. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. Her poetry appears in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Ruminate Magazine, Birdfeast Magazine, and Poets.org, among others. She was awarded the 2022 Wilbur Gaffney Poetry Prize through the Academy of American Poets, and is a Banff Art Centre fellow. Lachat teaches at the University of Nebraska, where she is pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing.

Previous MWPP Winners

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 fourteen books of poetry, most recently Sinnerman (Etruscan Press, 2023), 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.