The Fiddlehead’s 2024 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Contest is open!
$2000 CAD for Best Poem!
Good luck to all entrants. This year's contest deadline is Monday, December 2, 2024 (postmarked for mailed entries and 11:59 pm Atlantic Standard Time for Submittable entries). Our judges this year are Meghan Kemp-Gee, D.M. Bradford, and Colleen Coco Collins!
Meghan Kemp-Gee
Meghan Kemp-Gee is the author ofThe Animal in the Room (Coach House Books, 2023),Nebulas (Coach House Books, forthcoming 2025), and three poetry chapbooks (What I Meant to Ask,Things to Buy in New Brunswick, andMore). She also co-created the graphic novelOne More Year. She is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick and currently resides in North Vancouver.
D.M. Bradford
Darby Minott Bradford is a poet and translator based in Tio'tia:ke (Montreal). They are the author of Dream of No One but Myself (Brick Books, 2021), which won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and Governor General’s Literary Awards. House Within a House by Nicholas Dawson (Brick Books, 2023), Bradford's first translation, won the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award, the John Glassco Translation Prize, and was a GG finalist. Bottom Rail on Top is their second book.
Colleen Coco Collins
Colleen Coco Collins [she/they] is an interdisciplinary artist of Irish, French, and Odawa descent, working in songwriting, performance, poetry and visual arts. Her writing, music, and art practice centers on temporality, presumptions of sentience, subversion, rhythm, gesture, geographies, biophonies, frequencies the ouroboric, the peripatetic, love and the polyglottic. She lives littorally in rural Port Greville, Mikma'ki/Nova Scotia amidst crows, coyotes, grackles, bees, humpback, lichen and fox.
Colleen Coco Collins [elle/ils] est une artiste interdisciplinaire d'origine irlandaise, française et odawa, qui travaille sur l'écriture de chansons, la performance, la poésie et les arts visuels. Son écriture, sa musique et sa pratique artistique sont centrées sur la temporalité les présomptions de sensibilité, la subversion, le rythme, le geste, les géographies, les biophonies, les fréquences, l'ouroborique, le péripatéticien, l'amour et le polyglottique. Elle vit dans la région rurale de Port Greville, Mi'kma'ki/Nouvelle-Écosse, au milieu des corbeaux, des coyotes, des quiscales, des abeilles, des bossus, des lichens et des renards.
Contest General Rules and Information:
• Entries must be original and unpublished. No simultaneous submissions and no previously published (or accepted for publication) submissions. This means that an entry must not be under consideration elsewhere for publication, nor accepted elsewhere for publication, nor entered in any other contest. Work that has appeared on the internet (e.g., online magazines, blogs, or social media sites) is considered published for the purposes of this contest and is ineligible.
• An entry must be the original work of the person who is submitting it and the name and contact information provided must be the author’s. Contest entries should be submitted under the author’s real name. If you use a pseudonym for your published works, you will have a chance to inform the editor of this should your work be selected by the judges
• All entries must be submitted by mail or via Submittable. This year's contest deadline is Monday, December 2, 2024 (postmarked for mailed entries and before 11:59 pm Atlantic Standard Time for Submittable entries). No faxed or emailed submissions are allowed.
• The Fiddlehead will not read work that is ableist, misogynistic, queer-phobic or racist.
• No revisions or changes may be made to an entry once you have submitted it. So please carefully check your entry before you enter it into the contest.
• Judging for the contest is anonymous. Do not put your name or contact information or other identifying information (e.g., publishing pseudonyms) anywhere on your actual entry. For mailed entries place your name and contact information on an accompanying cover page along with information about the submission requested below. For Submittable entries, there will be a place on the Submittable form for your name and contact information.
• One poetry entry is up to 3 poems; no more than 100 lines per poem. If a poem is longer than one page, please make sure that each page is numbered and has the poem’s title in the header. Each poem should start on a new page. Poems may be single spaced. For mailed entries the title and the number of lines for each poem should be noted on the cover page. For Submittable entries, the title and the number of lines for each poem should be noted in the Submittable form.
• The entry fee for your first entry depends on where you are living. If your address is in Canada, then the fee for first entry is $35 CAD. Additional entries after that first contest entry are $10 CAD. If you do not live in Canada, then the fee accounts for the exchange rate and is $50 CAD (approximately $40 USD) for the first entry and $10 CAD for additional entries.
• You must submit a first entry (and pay the first entry fee) before submitting an additional entry. If you submit an additional entry without first submitting that first entry, your entry may be disqualified, and the entry fee will not be returned.
• You will receive a one-year subscription to The Fiddlehead with your first entry. New subscriptions will start with the next issue published after the contest closes. Already a subscriber? — you'll receive a one-year extension to your current subscription. Additional entries do not receive an additional subscription or subscription extension.
• The Fiddlehead occasionally swaps its subscription list with other literary organizations. If you don't wish to be included in such exchanges, please state this on your entry's cover page.
• The contest winner will be contacted directly (by either email or telephone) 2-3 months after the contest deadline. Other entrants will not be individually contacted about the results. Authors’ names and the titles of the works that make a shortlist of 10-15 will appear on The Fiddlehead website. The winner will be announced on the website and on The Fiddlehead social media spaces at a later date.
• The winning entry will be published in Issue 303 (Spring 2025) of The Fiddlehead and on the website. There is a publication payment in addition to the contest prize. The current publication payment rate is $65/page.
• The winner will be interviewed. The interview will be published on The Fiddlehead website when the issue featuring the winning piece is published.
• An entry will be disqualified (no matter at what stage in the contest process it is at), if it is discovered that an entry has violated the contest rule on simultaneous submissions, prior publication, or original authorship. The entry fee will not be reimbursed; however, the entrant will still receive the one-year subscription if the entry was an initial entry.
• An entry may be disqualified (no matter at what stage in the contest process it is at), if it is discovered that the author entered that entry as an additional entry and never submitted and paid for a first entry. The entry fee will be not be reimbursed; and if a subscription was started in error, it will immediately be cancelled.
For Submittable entries:
• You can only upload ONE file when entering via Submittable, (pdf, doc or .docx preferred; rtfs acceptable). Do not include a cover letter or bio as part of that file. Cover letters and bios will be deleted from any entry file.
• Remember only use the additional entry category IF you have already submitted and paid for a first contest entry.
For mailed entries:
Please send mailed submission to:
The Fiddlehead
Campus House
11 Garland Ct
University of New Brunswick
PO Box 4400
Fredericton NB
E3B 5A3
Canada
Please make cheque payable to The Fiddlehead.
