The 11th SUSPECT Poetry Contest

Deadline: May 15th, 2025
Awards: USD300, 200, and 100
No entry fee

The SUSPECT Poetry Contest, formerly the Singapore Poetry Contest, returns in 2025 with its 11th iteration!

In conjunction with Gaudy Boy’s April 2025 publication of Mandy Moe Pwint Tu’s FABLEMAKER (winner of the Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize), SUSPECT calls for poems that use the word “fable” or its variants in an imaginative fashion. We want fables and anti-fables, we want fable-adjacent poems, we want fabulous conceptions and language.

The contest is open to everyone. 

Awards of USD300, 200, and 100 will go to the top three winners. The winning poems will be published in SUSPECT; non-winning poems will be considered for publication as well. 

This year’s SUSPECT Poetry Contest judge is Mandy Moe Pwint Tu. Mandy Moe Pwint Tu is a pile of ginkgo leaves in a trench coat and the author of FABLEMAKER (Gaudy Boy, 2025). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, Beloit Poetry Journal, Porter House Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. Her chapbooks, MONSOON DAUGHTER and UNSPRUNG, were published by Thirty West Publishing House (2022) and Newfound (2023) respectively. She received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She is from Yangon, Myanmar.

Friends and family of the judge are allowed to submit entries too. Judging will be based solely on poetic merit and the creative use of the word “fable.” We reserve the right not to make any or all awards, should the quality of entries not merit them.

Contest entry is free. Please submit a maximum of three poems. Only unpublished poems will be considered. Posting on weblog, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media does not constitute publication. Any use of AI must be acknowledged clearly and in detail. No simultaneous submissions, please. Email your submission to Jee at jkoh@singaporeunbound.org. The poem(s) must be pasted into the body of the email, together with a short cover letter giving your name, mailing address, and brief biographical note.

The deadline for submissions is May 15th, 2025. Results will be announced in July.