2026 Spilled Ink Challenge
judged by Palette Poetry Editors
September 14, 2026 – September 27, 2026
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As summer comes to a close, Palette is excited to announce the 2026 Spilled Ink Challenge, a call for poets to share their raw, confessional, and accidental poems. From September 14 to September 27, we welcome emerging and established poets to submit poems that gnaw at the raw and vulnerable parts of the human experience, those secrets that weren’t meant to be spilled. Take inspiration from Anne Sexton’s epitomizing confessions in Love Poems, Larry Levis’s Winter Stars collection on family estrangement and grief, the articulate rage of Frank Bidart’s Watching the Spring Festival, or Louise Glück’s Winter Recipes from the Collective for stream of consciousness pondering on life, love, and death. We look forward to reading your poetic experimentations, your meditations on the difficult questions of life, your lamentations of lost love, and everything in between. One winner, chosen by Palette’s editors, will be awarded $500 and publication in Palette Poetry.
Submission Guidelines: Please read carefully!
- Submissions are open internationally, to any poet writing in English—inclusion of other languages is welcome, as long as the poem is largely written in English. At this time, Palette does not accept translated work unless you are also the author of the original poem.
- Your submission must be no more than three poems and under ten pages. Please submit all your poems in ONE document. Please begin each poem on a new page and include each poem’s individual title.
- We do accept multiple submissions (of one to three poems apiece), but each submission must include the $20 reading fee.
- We accept simultaneous submissions—just please send us a note if your work is accepted for publication elsewhere.
- We are only accepting unpublished work. If your poem has been published elsewhere, even on a blog or on social media, it is not eligible.
- DO NOT INCLUDE your name or identifying information in the document OR submission title box.
- Please include a brief cover letter(opens in new tab) in the cover letter box with your publication history, if any. This text box is where you can include your name and/or bio! If you select the editorial feedback or commentary option, this cover letter is also where you can name which poem you’d like feedback on. To safeguard our reading staff, please include content warnings in the cover letter, if applicable, as well.
- Review our FAQ page(opens in new tab) for frequently asked questions.
- NOTE: If after submitting you notice an error in your submission, please message us rather than withdrawing and resubmitting your submission. We can open it to editing once so you can correct the error.
- Palette Poetry does not accept AI-produced work.
- This challenge closes September 27, 2026. Submitters will be notified of their submission status within twelve weeks of the contest closing date.
Discount for Submitters
As a thank you for your support for Palette, we’d like to offer a 10% off discount code on a writing class from The Writing Salon(opens in new tab). Find a class and use the code included in the confirmation message at checkout.
Editorial Feedback Option
This option costs $59 and will provide you with two pages of detailed and actionable feedback on a poem of your choice from the submission, including suggestions for future submissions. The three-letter option costs $149 and will provide you with six pages of detailed and actionable feedback on a poem of your choice from the submission, including suggestions for future submissions, from three separate guest editors. Our guest editors are paid a significant portion of the fee and are all incredibly astute poets.
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