Gwendolyn Brooks Youth Poetry Awards 2025

Welcome to this year’s Gwendolyn Brooks Youth Poetry Awards, a statewide competition for K-12 students that celebrates the dynamic talent and creativity of Illinois’s young writers. This annual contest honors the legacy of Illinois’s own Gwendolyn Brooks: renowned poet, author, and the first Black Pulitzer Prize-winner. Each and every one of the young poets who take part in this competition is part of that legacy. Brooks, who founded the contest as Illinois Poet Laureate and ran it from 1969-2000, summed up the contest best in a note in 1977: “All the children who entered the contest are winners… They worked hard. They created. And that is what is important.” These annual awards are now stewarded by Illinois Humanities and are a platform for the next generation of poets to share their voices and develop their craft.

Youth poets, use this online portal to submit your work for consideration! We recommend you do your writing in a word processing program (e.g., Microsoft Word) and then upload the file into the form. We also recommend that you create an account so that you can save your application along the way.

Competition Rules

— All entries to the Gwendolyn Brooks Youth Poetry Awards must be submitted by Wednesday, May 1, 2025 at 11:59 p.m.

— The competition is open to young people currently in kindergarten through 12th grade across the state of Illinois.

— Limit one original poem per student, written in the current school year (August - May). Poems are judged based on student grade level.

— Poems for grades K-5 have a limit of 25 lines. Poems for grades 6-12 have a limit of 50 lines. Blank lines between stanzas are not counted.

— Poems should be uploaded as a PDF or word document (DOC or DOCX) into the submission form.

— Identifying information such as student name, school, and email should not appear on the uploaded poem itself. Please remove this information from the poem so that judges can be unbiased. Only the poem title and the poem itself should appear in the uploaded file.

— The goal of the awards is to encourage youth poets. Therefore, all entries must be the original work of the young person submitting the poem. The Gwendolyn Brooks Youth Poetry Awards has a no-tolerance policy for plagiarism and AI generated writing (ChatGPT or any other AI programs). 

Note: Poems are thoroughly reviewed by two independent panels of judges, one to determine semifinalists and the other to determine competition winners. All judges' decisions are final.

If you are a teacher wanting to upload student poems in bulk, please visit ilhumanities.secure-platform.com/site/page/bulk for instructions.

Questions or concerns? Feel free to email us at poetry@ilhumanities.org. We're happy to help!