The 2026 LemonLight PrizE
A celebration of poetry that follows its own path
$3,000 Prize Fund · Publication · Limited-Edition Anthology
Submissions Open March 1, 2026
About The Prize
The LemonLight Prize honors poetry that illuminates the unseen—work shaped by courage, craft, and emotional precision.
The 2026 Prize Fund totals $3,000 and will be awarded as follows:
Winner: $2,000 honorarium
Honorable Mentions (x4): $250 each
Additional contributors: Selected for publication in the anthology
Publication & Recognition
All winning and selected poems will appear in The LemonLight Anthology 2026, a limited-edition publication (print run of 250).
The Winner and Honorable Mentions will be featured on the Ink & Ribbon Press website and SubStack (6k+ followers).
The Winner will also receive a feature interview.
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
$2,000 Honorarium
Publication in The LemonLight Anthology
3x Complimentary Copies
Full-length manuscript publication*
Feature Interview
Winner
$250 Honorarium (each)
Publication in The LemonLight Anthology
2x Complimentary Copies
Feature Interview
honorable Mentions (4x)
Publication in The LemonLight Anthology
1x Complimentary Copy
Contributors
* Publication is contingent upon the winner having a complete, publishable manuscript, editorial alignment with Ink & Ribbon Press, contractual freedom to publish the work, and mutual agreement on scope and timing.
How To Enter
1
Prepare Your Poems
Up to 5 unpublished poems, no page limit.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.