Contest Submissions Close Monday✨
The Diode Editions Book & Chapbook Contests Close for Submissions Monday, July 15, 2024
Our mission is to amplify diverse voices. We are committed to justice, inclusivity, anti-racism, and equity. We strive to craft beautiful books and to fanatically support our authors.
Book & Chapbook Contests
Eligibility
The contests are open to all poets 18 years of age or older for manuscripts written in English or accompanied by an English translation. Collaborations, hybrid works, and simultaneous submissions are welcome. Please notify the team if your manuscript is accepted elsewhere.
Prizes
BOOK
$1,500.00, 10 author copies, publication within one year by Diode Editions, and select poems will be published in the 18th Anniversary Issue of diode poetry journal.
CHAPBOOK
$750.00, 10 author copies, publication within one year by Diode Editions, and select poems will be published in the 18th Anniversary Issue of diode poetry journal.
Submission Guidelines
View submission guidelines in full on the Diode Editions press website. We look forward to hearing from you!
Forthcoming Fall 2024
Cover Reveal
Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect by KOSS
Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect is a poetic assemblage of a life sown outside the predictability of middle-class, straight America, one where the aftermath of repeated trauma and loss is allayed by unexpected moments of connection, empathy, and love.
Koss pens inventive textual routes through life transits, forging head-on through the debris with unflinching vision and grit in a timbre that shifts from existential dread to dark comedy. Part dirge and part survival story, Dancing Backwards transmutes the rubble of trauma, abandonment, grief, and suicide loss into a queer, hybrid elixir, their lived story worthy of telling.
Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect by Koss
Preview the chapbook with the poem “Molotov Mother” first published in The Racket.
Molotov Mother
first published in The Racket
in your yellow beetle
with shot-out windows
you escaped me
devoted as I was
lighting the rags
in the passenger seat
while you hurled them
through the glass
of strangers’ buildings
my manual dexterity
at age seven
far surpassed my peers’
and what a way to kindle
my child’s love of fire
KOSS is a queer, mixed race writer and artist with numerous publications in both print and online journals. They were published in Best Small Fictions 2020, Get Bent, Beyond the Frame, and other anthologies and won the Wergle Flomp 2021 Humor Poetry Contest with “My Therapist Sez,” first published in diode poetry. Find them on Twitter and Instagram, or stop by their website to keep track of their activities.
NEW 2024 Books & Chapboooks
BOOTless → by Trace DePass
BOOTless → is inspired by Dr. King's 1967 interview for NBC, where he mentions
"America was giving away millions of acres of land in the west and the midwest, which meant that there was a willingness to give the white peasants from Europe an economic base, and yet it refused to give its black peasants from Africa, who came here involuntarily in chains and had worked free for 244 years, any kind of economic base. And so emancipation for the Negro was really freedom to hunger. It was freedom to the winds and rains of heaven. It was freedom without food to eat or land to cultivate, and therefore it was freedom and famine at the same time. And when white Americans tell the Negro to lift himself by his own bootstraps, they don't look over the legacy of slavery and segregation. I believe we ought to do all we can and seek to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps, but it's a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps, and many Negroes by the thousands and millions have been left bootless as a result of all of these years of oppression and as a result of a society that deliberately made his color a stigma and something worthless and degrading."
BOOTless → an archaic word also meaning ineffectual, is a black poet’s psychedelic meditation on gentrification, climate change, & post-pandemic grief, pointing its arrow back at its country that has stacked colonization on genocide & monopolized colonization & genocide. The book laughs at an oppressor’s self-elected right to canonize its theft & winning rhetoric under the guise of calling it history. This book may indict Whiteness, if not English itself, as using language built on oppression (a Deleuzian desire-machine sewn together by other languages) in order to create indefinite law on stolen land with indefinite marginalization for the people on it since the US nation's legal creation.
Via the contrapuntal(s), sonnet(s), & its own ‘elevator’ polyphonic form(s) as altar poem vessel(s): BOOTless → is offering that, despite what black & indigenous people lose everyday, the spirit is an omnitemporal language.
The Omnitemporal is Spirit. BOOTless → attempts to hold human fracture while each poem answers the last with reckoning & rapture, from contemporary libations to allusions of the biblical prophet Habakkuk's lamentations. DePass is asking the reader how sentient a poem can be? as a sentient poem states its case for autonomy & yall begin to play with the written voice(s).
BOOTless → is this conceit of black intergenerational grief, hood ethnography, voltas (alongside other poetic tools from the sonnet to the contrapuntal), & an internalized implied nothingness thereafter because black folk can feel helpless & without language or resources in our own rapturing, reckoning, &, regardless, love. BOOTless → still attempts to answer that, given a poem can have wants (to communicate, to connect, & contextualize), how can the black body of a poem have more agency and encourage the autonomy of its reader? Down to the parenthesis around the individual letter(s) in lines of these altar poems. There’s a playful character development of the Dr. King quote, concept, poem, & ultimately this chapbook in hopes for the reader too.
BOOTless → is reckoning with this idea that at some point, for the sake of truth, curiosity, & justice, we will be reminded that not all of us are saved because there is nothing (built literally on top of indigenous land) to save; neither white nor American Jesus will save us at all, & we may have to un-save ourselves eventually in order to survive. Bootless self-doubt could shiver down a black spine when thinking of (t)his potential black ineffectual affect & the negro will still steal back ALIVE in their own way in order to create the new forms we’ll all need to keep surviving: armorial in its new meaning.
all children. by Shabnam Piryaei
all children. is for the child in every reader.
May it open a portal to places that feel distant, obscured, or even devastating—to offer a light that speaks directly to the infinite and perfect light in each of us.
all children. is inspired by two kids journals: Highlights Magazine, the author’s daily refuge as a young, sibling-less immigrant child in the U.S.; and All Children Magazine, a Farsi and English kids journal the author published with her father out of their house when she was 12.
No Rest by Jason Koo
What do we truly know? Are we deceiving ourselves when we think we know ourselves or the world? Jason Koo's No Rest, a winner of the Diode Editions Book Contest, pursues these questions through a series of long poems like essays in verse that demonstrate the elusiveness of any answers even as they keep up the pursuit. The book begins on the day after the 2016 presidential election, when Koo discovers that his best friend from high school has killed himself by throwing himself in front of a train. The year he thought would be the best of his life—because of the unexpected joy of meeting his future wife and seeing his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers win the city's first championship since 1964—turns out to be just another triumph of his own self-absorption.
The book then returns to the start of 2016, unfolding along two arcs: one to the poet's fortieth birthday that August, the other spanning the next four years to the outbreak of COVID-19. With bitter honesty and irreverent, self-deprecating humor, Koo's No Rest explores the problem of how to emerge from the condition of the "exact same," the "saturation // of the same so-be-it that has always been" in American life, and the only truth that becomes clear over the course of this relentless, boundary-stretching book is that there is no rest to this quest. Juxtaposing personal failures against systemic ones, No Rest shows again and again that what we think is knowing is not knowing, doing is not doing, being is not being. We always find ourselves enclosed again in the "social fabric of fabrications," still trying to begin being in a more truthful, impactful way.
Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect by KOSS
forthcoming fall 2024
Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect is a poetic assemblage of a life sown outside the predictability of middle-class, straight America, one where the aftermath of repeated trauma and loss is allayed by unexpected moments of connection, empathy, and love.
Koss pens inventive textual routes through life transits, forging head-on through the debris with unflinching vision and grit in a timbre that shifts from existential dread to dark comedy. Part dirge and part survival story, Dancing Backwards transmutes the rubble of trauma, abandonment, grief, and suicide loss into a queer, hybrid elixir, their lived story worthy of telling.
Difficult by Rewa Zeinati
To what end do we admit the traumas we’ve inherited, the transgressions we’ve endured? How do we liberate our bodies from the choices we’ve made or the ones made on our behalf without permission? How do we transcend learned separateness and begin to move towards all that is perceived as not enough? How do we insist that it is in fact enough?