The Gwendolyn Brooks Youth Poetry Awards

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 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. 

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

All entries must be the original work of the young person submitting the poem, so AI cannot be used. The Gwendolyn Brooks Youth Poetry Awards has a no-tolerance policy for plagiarism and AI-generated writing (ChatGPT or any other AI programs). 

Poems must be written by only one author (sorry, we do not accept joint or co-written poems for this competition). 

We recognize that not all students in Illinois have access to computers or the internet, so paper submission forms are available upon request. To request a paper submission form, please email poetry@ilhumanities.org. Please do not request or send a paper submission if your student has regular access to the internet.

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.

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. Using our rubric, those reviewers assign a score to each poem, and those scores are averaged to determine the top scorers from each grade. 

The top 5 poems from each grade are then sent 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.

Please contact us at poetry@ilhumanities.org for a copy of the chapbook.