The Gulf Coast Prize in Translation is open to poetry submissions on even-numbered years, and short prose, fiction, and nonfiction on odd-numbered years. The winner receives $1,000 and publication in the journal. Two honorable mentions will each receive $250. All entries will be considered for publication as Online Exclusives.
Previous judges have included Sophie Hughes, Kristin Dykstra, and Katrina Dodson.
The contest entry fee includes either a one-year ($20) or half-year ($10) subscription to Gulf Coast, beginning with the issue in which the corresponding prize winners are published.
Deadline: September 30th.
This year's final judge is Mira Rosenthal.
Mira Rosenthal is the author of Territorial (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022), a Pitt Poetry Series selection, and The Local World (Kent State University Press, 2011), winner of the 2011 Wick Poetry Prize. Her translation of Tomasz Różycki's To the Letter (Archipelago Books, 2024) won the 2025 Found in Translation Award for the best book translated from Polish into English in the preceding year.
Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and residencies at Hedgebrook and MacDowell. Her work appears in such journals as Poetry, The New York Review of Books, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Guernica, Harvard Review, New England Review, A Public Space, and Oxford American. Her translations of Polish poetry include Krystyna Dąbrowska’s Tideline and Tomasz Różycki’s Colonies, which won the 2014 Northern California Book Award and was shortlisted for other prizes, including the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Rosenthal has taught creative writing, literature, and translation at various universities, including as a distinguished visiting writer at Cornell College and as a Fulbright scholar at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. She is professor of creative writing at Cal Poly.
Contest Guidelines