The LemonLight Prize
Desire Lines: A celebration of poetry that follows its own path — awarding $3,000.
About The Prize
The Lemonlight Prize celebrates poetry that follows its own path — work that illuminates the unseen, that honors craft and courage in equal measure.
Each year, one poet is awarded $3,000 and publication in The Lemonlight Anthology, alongside a selection of remarkable voices from around the world.
Founded by Ink & Ribbon Press, the prize exists to slow the press — to celebrate the written word as both art and artifact. Our mission is simple: to create beautiful, lasting editions that preserve poetry’s quiet brilliance in physical form.
this year’s theme
Desire Lines
In every landscape, there are paths that refuse to follow the design — quiet shortcuts worn by those who know a truer way through. Urban planners call them desire lines: routes we carve between where we are and where we ache to be.
For this year’s Lemonlight Prize, we seek poems that follow those inner tracks — the ones that appear when longing meets choice, when love overrides logic, when grief redraws the map. These are the paths of instinct and impulse, where our ordinary lives open into something luminous.
Whether your desire line leads through memory, wilderness, city streets, or the quiet terrain of the self, we want to read work that moves toward something true — poems that risk vulnerability and trust the body’s sense of direction.
We welcome all interpretations of Desire Lines and encourage submissions from poets of every identity and background. Let your work wander. Show us where your heart insists on going.
Awards & Recogniton
$3,000 Honorarium
Publication in The LemonLight Anthology & Complimentary Copy
Full-length manuscript publication*
Feature Interview
Winner
Publication in The LemonLight Anthology & Complimentary Copy
Feature Interview
honorable Mentions
Publication in The LemonLight Anthology & Complimentary Copy
Contributors
How To Enter
1
Prepare Your Poems
Upto 5 unpublish poems, no page limit. Save as PDF, DOCX and remove any identification.
2
Submit
Use our SubFolio link to securely pay and submit your entry.
3
Celebrate
Winners announced August 2026 with anthology published December 2026
Meet The Judges
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Founder & Executive Editor, Ink & Ribbon Press
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Poet Laureate
Why “The LemonLight Prize”?
The LemonLight Prize takes its name from G. K. Allum’s poem Middlesex, where “the lemonlight horizon languorously arcs.”
In that image—half dawn, half memory—the poem looks back toward England, to fields and voices half-remembered, and forward toward what must change.
Lemonlight became a symbol for the press itself: the fragile hour between what was and what might be. It speaks to the longing that lives inside all art—the desire to preserve what’s passing while still reaching for transformation.
The prize honors poets who write from that threshold, whose work glows with both tenderness and restlessness, illuminating the distance between memory and renewal.