The 2026 Furious Flower Poetry Prize:

The Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University, the nation’s first academic center devoted to Black poetry, offers a $1,500 prize for a group of three poems through its annual prize. The Furious Flower Poetry Center is committed to ensuring the visibility, inclusion, and critical consideration of Black poetry in American letters and across the full range of educational curricula. Through programs, publications, and productions, the Center celebrates Black poetry's rich global and national traditions, exposes and educates audiences about its historical and contemporary impact, and preserves its powerful legacy for future generations. We welcome submissions in conversation with the Center’s mission. Poets with no more than one published book are invited to submit up to three poems for consideration. 

Prizes:

Winner: $1,500 

Honorable mention: $750 

Both the winner and honorable mention will be invited to read as part of the Furious Flower Poetry Reading Series in September 2026. The winner, honorable mention, and select finalists will also be published in Obsidian. 

2026 Judge: 

Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, including Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (2023), The Absurd Man (2020), Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006) and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. He is also the author of A Beat Beyond: The Selected Prose of Major Jackson, edited by Amor Kohli. A recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, John S. Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry London,and World Literature Today. Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.

Submissions are read blind, and the judge will not see any identifying information.

Submission Guidelines: 

• Submit up to 3 poems that do NOT exceed 6 total pages. Please put all poems in a single PDF document.
• Upload all work through our submission manager in a PDF file format only.
• No previously published work will be accepted.
• Simultaneous submissions are welcome. If your work is accepted elsewhere, please withdraw your submission, send us a note on Submittable, or notify us immediately by emailing us at furiousflower@jmu.edu. 
• Please do not put your name in the poems, in the submission, or in the file name. We read these submissions blind. Failure to comply will result in disqualification from the prize.

Eligibility rules: 

• Authors with more than one published or self-published book are not eligible. This does NOT include chapbooks; this rule is only relevant to full-length collections.
• Winner and honorable mention must be available to read at the Poetry Prize Reading in September.
• You may only submit one submission entry up to three poems that do NOT exceed six total pages. Multiple submission entries will disqualify you.
• Please note: Current JMU employees and students are not eligible for this prize.
• Previous winners are not eligible for the prize. (Honorable mentions and finalists are eligible)
• Submission fees are non-refundable.