Submissions for NRR are now open through Sept. 1, 2023 for the 15th Narrative Poetry Contest. Sarah Browning is our judge this year. Top prize wins $1000, second prize $250 and third prize is $100. All winners, finalists and semi-finalists will be published in the winter/spring contest issue of Naugatuck River Review. Please read the full guidelines below before submitting. Good luck!

Here are our general guidelines:

GUIDELINES:

PLEASE READ THE GUIDELINES BEFORE SUBMITTING YOUR WORK.

We accept ELECTRONIC SUBMISSIONS ONLY through Submittable. 

There are two submission periods for NRR -  Open submissions (no fee) are Jan. 1 - March 15. Contest submissions are open July 1- Sept. 1 each year and there is a $20 fee which pays for the prizes and publication of the journal for the year.

Please submit no more than 3 unpublished NARRATIVE poems (for our definition of narrative poetry, see below). Please, no more than 50 lines per poem in ONE MSWord file, Times New Roman preferred (.doc or .docx or .rtf preferred, pdf if complicated formatting only). Please remove your name from your document, as the poetry is read blind. DO NOT use fonts other than Times, Callibri, Georgia or Garamond 12.

Questions ONLY: Feel free to email us at naugatuckriver@aol.com. 

Simultaneous submissions are fine as long as you inform us right away if your poem has been picked up by another publication. We claim first North American serial publication rights, so rights revert to the author after the initial publication period, just please give us credit.  We will only consider work that has not been previously published.  Member CLMP.

WHAT IS NARRATIVE POETRY?
What NRR is looking for are poems that tell a story, or have a strong sense of story. They can be stories of a moment or an experience, and can be personal, fictional or historical. A good narrative poem that would work for our journal has a compressed narrative, and we prefer poems that take up two pages or less of the journal (50 lines max). We are looking above all for poems that are well-crafted, have an excellent lyric quality and contain a strong emotional core. Any style of poem is considered, including prose poems. Poems with very long lines don’t fit well in the format.