The Megaphone Prize 2025
The Megaphone Prize is an annual contest from Radix Printing & Publishing Cooperative dedicated to the discovery of timely, urgent, and interrogative collections from debut writers of color.
This year, the prize is open to poetry collections by debut writers of color. Submissions are open March 1 to April 30. Submissions will only be accepted through Submittable.
The Guest Judge for this year’s prize is author Safia Elhillo.
One winner will receive $1,000 and 20 author copies. At Radix, we pride ourselves on the production of superior quality, purposefully designed books.
Guest Judge
Sudanese by way of D.C., Safia Elhillo is the author of Girls That Never Die, The January Children, Home Is Not a Country, and Bright Red Fruit, and co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me. Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, the California Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, and the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, she is also the recipient of a Cave Canem Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from The Poetry Foundation. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, The Penguin Book of Migration Literature, and The New Yorker, among others.
WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR
From March 1 through April 30, we’re open to poetry collections that shift, exalt, renew, entangle, tear and suture, and consecrate something deep within us. When we say poetry, we mean wonder, fluidity, joy, percipience, disruption. We’re not tethered to any forms or constructs; we like poetry that helps us reimagine our relationship with the written word.
As is the case with every Radix publication, we are looking for work that believes the personal is political, that comes from a place of deep interrogation and critique of one’s self and society at large, that is rebellious at heart, and that seeks to question the status quo.
Previous iterations of the prize and its winners are:
—Poetry Chapbooks (2020): There is Still Singing in the Afterlife (2020) by JinJin Xu and BINT by Ghinwa Jawhari (2021) chosen by guest judge Aria Aber
—Short Story Collections (2021): Is This How You Eat a Watermelon? (2022) by Zein El-Amine chosen by Guest Judge Deesha Philyaw
—Essay Collections (2023): The Land is Holy (2024) by noam keim chosen by Guest Judge Hanif Abdurraqib
We’re looking for manuscripts between 48 to 90 pages. This is excluding of front matter and table of contents. Individual poems may have been published in journals or limited-run chapbooks, but not in full-length collections and at least 40% of the collection should be unpublished at the time of submission. Manuscripts translated from other languages will not be considered, although it is perfectly alright (and even welcome) for the manuscript to invoke other languages. Only single-author submissions will be considered at this time. Simultaneous submissions are fine so long as they’re withdrawn immediately on acceptance elsewhere.
We like collections bound by a clear narrative throughline, where the opening and closing poems are bookended in dialogue, where there is intertextuality between the poems—where a single pulsating heart beats through the entire manuscript. Here are some exceptional recent collections that we’ve enjoyed immensely:
Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali
…: Poems by Fady Joudah
Muscle Memory by Jenny Liou
Girls That Never Die by Safia Elhillo
Root Fractures by Diana Khoi Nguyen
The Moon That Turns You Back: Poems by Hala Alyan
All entries will be considered for publication. Finalists may be offered publication.
Submission Guidelines
- Open to debut writers of color writing in the English language (not exclusively), residing in the USA at the time of publication. Should not have published a full-length collection in the genre of submission. Chapbook publications are okay.
- There is an entry fee of $12. As a small press, charging an entry fee allows us to offset expenses incurred from running the contest. If you are unable to pay the fee at this time, please email meher@radixmedia.org, and your submission fee will be waived. 25 fee waivers are available.
- Please submit a manuscript between 48-90 pages. Your manuscript must be a single Word or PDF document. Please include a title page and table of contents page. DO NOT INCLUDE YOUR NAME, EMAIL ADDRESS, PHONE NUMBER, OR ANY IDENTIFYING INFORMATION IN THE MANUSCRIPT. Please do not include a dedication page or publishing acknowledgements at this stage. Manuscripts that do not adhere to these guidelines will be immediately disqualified. Poems can be single-spaced.
The manuscript should ONLY include the following: Title page, table of contents, followed by poems. Epigraphs can be included. - Translations and self-published books are not eligible. The manuscript must be the product of one single author.
- In the cover letter, please include a short synopsis on your collection, a list of acknowledgements for the published poems in the collection, and a brief third-person bio with pronouns.
- Simultaneous submissions are welcome, but please notify us ASAP if your collection is accepted elsewhere.
- Please direct all questions to meher@radixmedia.org
About Radix
Radix Printing & Publishing Cooperative is a worker-owned independent press and print shop based in Brooklyn, New York. We publish new ideas and fresh perspectives, prioritizing the voices of typically marginalized communities to get to the root of the human experience.