Black History Contest 2025

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The theme for this contest is “Music in Black, African, and African American Culture.” For more details on the contest prize, see below.

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Time has graced us with another fantastic February—a time to commemorate the advancements of African Americans in the history of mankind. This year, the theme for Polyphony Lit’s annual Black History Month competition is “Music in Black, African, and African American Culture.”

 

Music in African American culture became widespread as a result of slavery and confinement. Music was an avenue for enslaved people to hold onto hope in troubling times. Well-known gospel songs have been passed down orally from generation to generation. The influence that African Americans have on music is undeniable. Black artists are at the foundation of hip-hop, rap, soul, rock-and-roll, R&B, gospel, jazz, and blues. 

 

We encourage you to explore how the rhythm and cadence of music can be translated into writing. We also encourage you to listen to music of various Black artists—Kendrick Lamar, Loretta James, Michael Jackson, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jimi Hendrix, and Prince, for example— as a source of inspiration regarding how they inject their social identity into their lyrics and composition to create gratifying albums. 

 

Despite the seemingly poetic connotation of the prompt, we encourage you to explore all mediums — perhaps a character in a short story discovers the joy of music for the first time. Perhaps you write a creative nonfiction essay on your personal relationship with music overtime. It is all up to your creative interpretation.

 

How can you translate the feeling of listening to musical notes into words and phrases? How can you instill a rhythm into your writing — whether it is literally instilled through the cadence and meter, or figuratively by discussing rhythm? How can you take the two mediums of auditory and visual art and put them in conversation? These are questions to consider when writing your piece for this competition. Best of luck!​

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Looking for inspiration? Check out previous winners of Polyphony Lit's Black History Contest, including "The Sun and Flowers, My Heaven's Neighbor" by Olivia Cyrus, "I Speak in Kente" by Audric Adonteng, and "SONG OF A BROKEN LANGUAGE" by Arikewusola Abdul.

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Interested in honing your poetry-writing skills for the contest? Then try taking our poetry workshop, Around the World of Poetry in 80 Days. This workshop will help you to brainstorm, draft, and revise poems of your own! And you will get the opportunity to learn about poetry from writers based in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and Jamaica, among many other places!

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Interested in becoming an editor for Polyphony Lit? Take our editorial training course and join the staff!

 

Black History Contest Guidelines

• Submissions will open on January 1st and will remain open until February 28th or until we reach our submission cap of 200 submissions.

• Please note that this is a separate submission category from Polyphony Lit Volume 20.​ Submissions to Polyphony Lit Volume 20 will receive feedback from the editors, but for the seasonal contests, only the winning submissions will receive feedback from the judge.

• If you have already submitted your work to the Volume 20 category, then please do not send the same submission to this contest category.

• If you submit to this contest category first and your work is declined, then you may submit it to the Volume 21 category after the contest is finished.

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Writer Qualifications​

• High school students aged 14-18 who identify as Black / African American / African / Afro-Latinx are eligible to submit. For ease of reference, we roughly define this as writers of Black or African origin (Eg: African American, Jamaican, Haitian, Nigerian, Ethiopian, Somalian, etc). However, we understand that people of African descent are incredibly diverse and often come from many different backgrounds, so we hope that you will not be limited in any way by these categories. In the interest of reaching a diverse array of demographics, we are also open to submissions from writers who may identify as Middle Eastern / North African. For the purpose of this contest, we simply use the term “African” in a geographic sense. If you do not fall under these demographics, but are still interested in writing about the theme, then feel free to submit to our Winter Contest submission category!

• We do not accept submissions from editors who currently serve on the staff of Polyphony Lit.

• Submit a maximum of three pieces.

• If submitting multiple pieces, please upload as separate submissions. Multiple pieces submitted in a single document will be withdrawn, and you will be asked to resubmit your pieces separately.

• We accept simultaneous submissions and work that has been published elsewhere. If submitting previously published work, please send a message in Submittable noting where and when your work has been published, and if it is eligible for republication. If it is accepted for publication elsewhere after submitting to Polyphony Lit, please notify us immediately but do not withdraw your submission if you are still interested in publication at Polyphony Lit. If we accept a previously published submission for publication, we will acknowledge the place of the original publication.

• Previously published pieces are not eligible for the Claudia Ann Seaman Awards.

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Length

• Poetry must be 80 lines or less.

• Fiction and creative nonfiction must be 1,800 words or less.

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Formatting

• Do not put your name on the piece, as all work is blind juried.

• Submissions longer than one page should have the page number inserted at the top (right or left side) of every page, as it would help our Judge specify the location for their commentary.

• We accept submission in .doc, .docx or .rtf formats.

• We prefer common conventions:

  • Color: Black & white

  • Font Size: 12 pt throughout, including titles

  • Font Type: Times or Times New Roman

  • Margins: 1-inch at the top and bottom, and 1.25 inch at the left and right. One space after periods. There should be no extra returns after paragraphs unless you have a meaningful reason for the extra space.

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Using Submittable

• Please upload submissions through Submittable. We do not accept email submissions or hard copies via mail.

• Upload only one piece per submission file; to submit more than one piece, make more than one submission file.

• Submissions for this contest are free.

• There is a submission cap of 200 submissions, so we may close submissions for the contest before the deadline if we receive 200 submissions. We recommend submitting early, to ensure that you do not miss the deadline.

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Prize

There will be one winner and two finalists. The winners/finalists will receive:

• Publication in Polyphony Lit Volume 20

• Eligibility for the Claudia Ann Seaman Awards

• Editorial feedback from the Contest Judge

• Social media posts announcing the winners

• An honorary emblem next to the published work on the website

• A full scholarship for Polyphony Lit’s "How to be a Literary Editor" course. Upon completion of the course, students will be eligible to join the editorial staff of Polyphony Lit!

• Please note that only the three winners will receive feedback from the Judge.

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Additional Guidelines for Creative Nonfiction​

• At Polyphony Lit, we look for creative nonfiction pieces that are written in the style of short personal memoirs. We are looking for pieces that are informal, flexible in form, and most importantly, personal. Personal discovery is the keystone of a personal essay. Self-revelation, human experiences, humor, and flexibility of form are all aspects that we look for in pieces we publish as creative non-fiction.

• We do not look for op-ed pieces, critical analyses, research papers, or academic essays.

• We would advise reading some samples of our work, in order to understand the material that we publish. Here are some samples of creative nonfiction that we have published:

• Memories of the Boy I Didn't Know

• responses to love

• Holiday in a Burning City