The Black Spring Press Group

Any poem, published or unpublished, originally written in English by one author, and first published and/or written between January 1 2010 and December 31, 2025, is eligible for submission. Poets from any country are welcome, but must be aged 18 or over by time of entry.
The top 100 poems (by different poets) will be selected and included in an anthology to be published including a bio page for each poet, and will be sold in the USA, UK, Ireland, Canada and elsewhere where possible.
Each Submission may include up to five poems.
This is not a blind competition, so add bio note and contact details with publishing credits for the poems, please.
Poems can be up to 120 lines long; must be submitted as word or pdf docs; single-spaced, 12-font and Arial or times new roman, preferably, with stanza breaks across multiple pages marked.
Judges will be the editorial team at our publishing imprints and companies.
We are open to all forms, styles, genres, and poetics, from the most traditional to the most experimental, and will seek to adjudicate on the terms on which the texts are offered, except insofar as the poems must be texts (not multimedia or recorded only, but somehow inscribed). We seek to impose no uniform or dominant critical perspective.
In the unlikely eventuality we receive insufficient submissions, we will cancel the competition and return all entries.
No current Eyewear employee, or student or close family member of any of the judges will be eligible.

THE JACK SWIFT BEST 'IRISH WRITERS AND POETS' PRIZE 2021-25 is a new writing prize aimed at celebrating and discovering talented writers and poets who consider themselves, in some way, Irish. The judge will be a respected poet or writer. The prize will be inclusion in an internationally-published paperback edition by Black Spring Press (founded 1985) that will never include more than a tenth of submitted works. The top prize will be a thousand US dollars and a book deal.

The judge: Frank Dullaghan is an Irish writer who has lived in Ireland, UK, UAE, and Malaysia. He has four collections of poetry published by Cinnamon Press and a pamphlet, Secrets of the Body, a series of poems about the mythical Pope Joan, published by Eyewear Publishing. His fifth collection, In the Coming of Winter, is due out from Cinnamon in Autumn 2021. Frank holds an MA with Distinction in Writing from the University of South Wales. Before moving to Dubai in 2006, Frank was a co-founder of the Essex Poetry Festival and the editor of Seam, poetry magazine for many years.

Frank's screenplay for the short film Melody, featured in the best short films at the Dubai 48 hour film competition in 2012 and won the audience award at the Mumbai Womens International Film Festival. He also had short stage plays performed regularly in Dubai while he lived there. His short story, A Place of Grace, was shortlisted in the London Magazine Short Story Competition 2017. He has two novels in draft form and is currently working on a screen play for one of them.

The prize is named after the Quebec-born Irish-Canadian wit, bon vivant, writer and McGill law graduate Jack Swift.

ELIGIBILITY:

1. Any person 18 years or older.

2. The author must be living at time of entry.

3. Any person who considers themselves to be Irish is eligible to enter, including but not limited to: persons with an Irish or Northern Irish birth certificate, passport or other form of identity papers; Irish adoptive or birthparents, or grand-parents; anyone currently resident in, or studying in, Ireland. Anyone resident anywhere in the world who considers themselves part of the Irish diaspora. The prize runners do not intend to adjudicate who is or is not Irish, and we will accept all reasonable claims, outside of the clearly satirical or fanciful.

4. The work submitted can have been previously published but copyright must remain with the author.

5. The author must be the sole and original author.

6. No illustrations or other non-textual material should be included.

7. Any form of writing may be submitted by word doc or pdf in the shorter forms - stories of 10,000 words or less; poems of 100 lines or less; brief monologues of five minutes running or less (can be excerpted from longer plays or screenplays). No novels or novellas or full collections, please.

8. For the purposes of submission, no aliases or pseudonyms - this does not relate to publishing terms. The entrant cannot be a current or former employee of the press or judge, or a close relative of the judge or any employee of the press. Those previously or currently published by the press ARE eligible. This is not a 'blind' contest in order to guarantee submission ethics guidelines are followed.

9. The small entry fee is to be used ONLY to cover the costs of the prize, including its administration, and payment for prizes and judging fees, as well as to help raise funds for the small indie press, Black Spring, following several months when almost all Irish and UK bookstores have been closed.

10. Payment of an entry fee in no way leads to automatic inclusion or acceptance in any book.

11. The judge's decisions are final.

12. The contest can be closed without notice at any time due to lack of sufficient entrants; and all money returned within 60 days to entrants.

The Best New British and Irish Poets competition collects poems from the best new poets in the UK and Ireland. It is based on a similar and well-known US prize anthology. Each judge is free to decide what 'best' means for them. The judge's selected poems will be published in The Best New British and Irish Poets anthology in 2026, following the anthologies from 2016 to 2021.

Judges: tba

Eligibility: poets resident in the UK or Ireland, regardless of nationality, as well as passport holders from the UK or Ireland who live abroad, are eligible to submit work for consideration if they have not yet published (and are not under contract to publish at time of entry) a full-length collection of poetry. Poets who have published pamphlets are eligible to compete as are poets included in previous editions of the anthology.  It is now past time in the UK to celebrate and promote the true diversity of British poetry, and as a press we are constantly studying, reading, listening, learning, and discussing, as we aim to always grow, do better, and be the best we could hope to be.

Guidelines: submit original poems in the English language for consideration. Poems may have appeared before in print periodicals, journals, or magazines, and even in online venues. Please include any prior publication information for each submitted poem in your cover letter. Your cover letter should also include a brief biographical note with your contact details. Do not include your name on your poems.

READING FEE: Because we need to pay a judge/editor to read all the submissions, and their time is worth respecting with a small fee, we will be charging 5 pounds per poem submitted. We hope this will not be a barrier to submission. If any one wishes to submit, and cannot afford this small payment, they may contact us at info @ eyewearpublishing.com so we can offer them an alternative option. This small fee is not used to make any profit by our company. The Submittable platform takes a percentage so this leaves us with 3.76 per poem. We note that many presses and poetry contests, including the National Poetry competition charge reasonable entry fees.