The Fare Forward
Poetry Competition
The 2025 Fare Forward Poetry Competition will be open for submissions from July 1, 2025 to August 31, 2025.
If you have submitted to our competition before, please note that there are several changes to the rules and prizes this year.
Fare Forward: A Christian Review of Ideas is excited to host its fifth annual poetry competition. Although Fare Forward is a journal edited and primarily written by Christians, we are not seeking exclusively religious or spiritual poetry. We are drawn to poems that engage with the complexity of the human experience, whether or not that includes a religious element. The most important criterion, however, is poetic excellence. We are seeking well-crafted poems with strong imagery, exciting language, and attention to sound. We welcome all styles, from formal verse to the experimental and everything in between.
Submission
Details
THE COMPETITION IS CLOSED.
It will run from July 1 to August 31, 2025.
Prizes:
1st Place — $350, publication, and the creation of a letterpress broadside designed and printed by Scale House Print Shop
2nd Place — $200 and publication
3rd Place — $150 and publication
2 Honorable Mentions — $75 and publication
The competition will open on July 1, 2025, on Fare Forward’s website. The deadline for contest submissions is August 31, 2025, at 11:59 PM Eastern Standard Time.
Selection Process:
Whitney Rio-Ross, Fare Forward’s poetry editor, will select 25 poems as semifinalists. At that point, the other editors will cast votes to choose 15 poems as finalists. The final judge, our 2024 Competition winner Julie L. Moore, will choose the winners and honorable mentions from those finalists.
Winners and honorable mentions will be announced September 30, 2025.
Guidelines:
- Entrants may include up to 3 poems in a single submission with a $15.00 entry fee. Multiple submissions are allowed with a $15.00 entry fee per additional submission.
- Submissions must be made online by emailing poems to fareforwardjournal@gmail.com and paying the entry fee through your PayPal account to fareforwardjournal@gmail.com. You may also click on the “Submit Fee” button on the bottom of this page. Do NOT submit the payment through the PayPal widget on this website; it is set up for magazine subscriptions and will automatically charge you $40.
- No poem may exceed 32 lines, beginning with the first line of text below the title.
- All submissions must be previously unpublished.
- Submit your poems in separate documents. Please submit each poem as a Microsoft Word document or PDF.
- This is a blind competition. Do not include your name anywhere on your submission document or in the title. Submissions that include identifying information in the submission document or in the document’s title will be immediately disqualified. Use a poem’s title as the title of its Word or PDF file.
- Simultaneous submissions are allowed, but you must withdraw your poem immediately if it is selected for publication elsewhere.
- Previous contributors and poetry competition finalists (including 2nd and 3rd place) are welcome to submit to the competition.
- Close friends or recent students of poetry editor Whitney Rio-Ross or the final judge may not enter the competition. Recent students include students who have taken a semester-long or year-long course with either judge in the last three years.
- All decisions made by the judges regarding the winners are final. No contest entry fees will be returned.
- By submitting, you are agreeing to all contest rules.
If you have any questions about the competition or guidelines, email us at fareforwardjournal@gmail.com.
Congratulations to our 2024 winners:
First Place: “Ulmus americana,” by Julie L. Moore
Second: “childless in prospect park” by Aberdeen Livingstone
Third: “Utterance of Repair” by Laura Reece Hogan
Honorable Mentions:
“As Though” by Sally Thomas
“Someday All This Will Be Yours” by Matthew Pullar
Final Judge
Julie L. Moore
A Best of the Net and eight-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Julie L. Moore is the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, Full Worm Moon, which won a 2018 Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award and received honorable mention for the Conference on Christianity and Literature’s 2018 Book of the Year Award. Her other books include Particular Scandals (Cascade Books, 2013), Slipping Out of Bloom (WordTech Editions, 2010), and the chapbook, Election Day (Finishing Line Press, 2006). Moore has won the Fare Forward poetry competition, the Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize from Ruminate Magazine, the Editor’s Choice Award from Writecorner Press, and the Rosine Offen Memorial Award from the Free Lunch Arts Alliance. Moore’s poetry has appeared in hundreds of journals such as African American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Image, Missouri Review Online, New Ohio Review, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, SWWIM, and Verse Daily. Likewise, her poetry has appeared in dozens of anthologies, including Becoming: What Makes a Woman, published by the University of Nebraska Gender Programs; Every River On Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio, published by Ohio University Press; How Higher Education Feels: Commentaries on Poems That Illuminate Emotions in Learning and Teaching, published by Oxford Learning Institute, University of Oxford, UK; Taking Root in the Heart: Thirty-Four Poets from the “Christian Century,” published by Paraclete Press; and the forthcoming Keystone Poetry: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, to be published by Penn State University Press. Moore’s creative nonfiction has also appeared in Relief Journal, Christianity Today, and Doubleback Review; her essay “Spiritus Mundi” likewise won the Donald Murray Prize from Writing on the Edge. After directing two university Writing Centers for 20 years, she now lives in Indiana and works at Eastern University for its LifeFlex program as a Senior Online Advisor and Instructor of First Year Composition. You can learn more about her writing at julielmoore.com.