The Gwendolyn Brooks Youth Poetry Awards

• January 2024: Submissions portal opens
• First Wednesday in May: Submissions close
• May-July: Judging process takes place
• Mid-July - Early August: Winners and honorable mentions are notified
• Mid-August - Early September: Awards ceremony in Chicago

Winning poets will be notified before the end of August. Awardees and their families will receive prize packages including a cash award, poetry books, and a copy of a chapbook produced by Illinois Humanities that includes all of the winning poems. Awardees will also be invited to join us at the Gwendolyn Brooks Youth Poetry Awards Ceremony in Chicago taking place in late August or early September, where poets will get to read their poems live. Poets who are unable to attend the ceremony live may also submit a video of their poetry reading to be played at the event.

We recognize that not all students in Illinois have access to computers or the internet, and for those students we encourage them to mail their submission to Illinois Humanities at 125 South Clark St., Ste. 650, Chicago, IL, 60603. Paper submission forms are available upon request; please do not request or send a paper submission if your student has regular access to the internet.

Are you an educator for K-12 students? If yes, then you can submit poems on behalf of your students for consideration in the competition. Simply note on the online submission form when prompted that you’re a teacher or educator, and follow the steps outlined on the submission form. 

At this time, we can only accept and effectively judge poems written in English.

Educators may submit student poems in bulk, such as an entire class or after school program. To indicate this on the submission form, simply choose “yes” in the question about bulk uploading student work, then follow the directions at the bottom of the page. Poems must be uploaded as a single PDF or Word document and must:

• Be prefaced with a cover sheet containing the student’s name, grade, age, gender, and preference for anonymity
• Contain only one poem per page, per student
• Include only the poem’s text and title on the page (no names or identifying information)

All poems are judged anonymously. Once the submission deadline has been reached, Illinois Humanities sends the entries, without the author's identifying information, to a team of first-round reviewers for an initial screening round. Those reviewers assign a score to each poem, and those scores are averaged to determine the top scorers from each grade. Depending on the outcome of the scoring, the top 5-10 poems from each grade are sent on to a final judging committee comprised of representatives from Illinois Humanities, Brooks Permissions, and the Poetry Foundation. The judging committee selects two winners and one honorable mention for each grade. 

Yes! Our younger poets often submit hand-drawn pictures with their poems, and we love to see them. Scans are always welcome. We prefer that all poems be submitted on white paper in a standard font with black text.

We, unfortunately, do not accept erasure poems or any other poetry based on the words of other writers, and we are very strict about plagiarism. We accept spoken word-oriented poems, but the poem must be able to live comfortably on the page so that it can be read and evaluated by our judges.

On principle, we do not censor student work for this competition. We ask that you exercise judgment in submitting poems that include profanity or potentially triggering content, as most of our student audience is children below the age of 14. However, we value our youth poets’ voices and that sometimes may include controversial vocabulary choices.

Please contact us for a copy of the chapbook.