The Jake Adam York Prize

The Jake Adam York Prize for a first or second poetry collection is a collaboration between Copper Nickel and Milkweed Editions.

Book-length manuscripts can be Submitted via Submittable from July 1 through October 15. (See the Guidelines. See information about the 2023-24 winner.)

The prize-winning poet receives $2,000 and publication by Milkweed Editions.

Initial screening for the prize will be facilitated by the poetry editors of Copper Nickel. (All screeners for the prize will have published at least one book of poetry.) The winner is announced in early March.

Our goal in instituting the Jake Adam York Prize is to honor Jake’s name and legacy with a top-tier, ethical book prize that will offer not just publication but also high-quality design, marketing, and strong national distribution­. Milkweed Editions—which has an excellent marketing team and national distribution through Publishers Group West (PGW)—can offer these things. We at Copper Nickel are grateful and excited for their partnership.

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GUIDELINES for 2025–26

For the 2025–26 prize we will begin accepting online submissions of book-length (i.e., more than 48 pages) poetry manuscripts on July 1, 2025. The final due date for submission will be October 15, 2025. The prize winner will be announced in early March, 2026.

Our judge for 2025–6 will be announced before July 1.

To be eligible for the prize, poets cannot have published—or have under contract—more than one full-length book of poetry in English. (Chapbooks of less than 48 pages and individual poems in magazines are OK.)

Self-published books count as previous book publications if they are at least 48 pages and saw any real distribution whatsoever. (I.e., if your self-published book has an ISBN, and/or has been distributed through Amazon, and/or has had a web presence—even a very limited one—that counts as a previously published book.)

Separate books published in English abroad also count toward eligibility, but not books reprinted abroad or published in another language. (I.e., if you published one book in the US and a different book in the UK, you would be ineligible to submit, but if you published a book in the US and that book was reprinted in the UK, you would still be eligible. If you published one book in the US in English and another book in, say, Poland in Polish you would still be eligible to submit to our prize as long as the book you were submitting to our prize was a not a translation of the book you published in Poland in Polish.)

Previously self-published books are ineligible for submission for the prize, as are translations and co-authored books.

Poets must be US Citizens (living abroad is fine) or must live in the US and be writing in English.

Poets who are family, current colleagues, close friends, or recent students (within the past five years) of the judge are not eligible to enter. Former student editors and interns of Copper Nickel and Milkweed Editions are also ineligible.

Entrants to the Jake Adam York Prize are welcome to submit to other book prizes, including the other Milkweed Editions prizes (the Ballard Spahr Prize, the Max Ritvo Prize, and the National Poetry Series). If your manuscript wins another prize, please notify us and withdraw your manuscript from the Jake Adam York Prize.

Manuscripts can—but don’t have to—include work previously published in literary periodicals and/or chapbooks. If your manuscript includes previously published work, please include an acknowledgments page.

Final judging for the prize is anonymous. For this reason, please do not include your name or other identifying marks on the manuscript itself. (We will be able to obtain that information from Submittable, and the information will not be forwarded to the final judge.)

All entrants will receive a one-year subscription to Copper Nickel (worth $20) in exchange for a $25 reading fee, and all money raised beyond production costs for the prize will go toward paying Copper Nickel contributors.

Please note that when you submit your work to the Jake Adam York Prize you’re adding yourself to our contact list and, thus, consenting to receiving perhaps 1–2 emails per year about our book prize, subscriptions drives, etc.

Here’s the link one more time: SUBMIT.

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ANNOUNCING THE WINNER OF THE 2024–25 JAKE ADAM YORK PRIZE!

Copper Nickel and Milkweed Editions are thrilled to announce that judge Matthew Olzmann has chosen Bo Hee Moon’s book Birthstones in the Province of Mercy as the winner of the 2024–25 Jake Adam York Prize. Birthstones in the Province of Mercy will be published by Milkweed Editions in January, 2026, and Moon will receive $2,000.

A South Korean adoptee, Bo Hee Moon is the author of one previous book of poems, Omma, Sea of Joy and Other Astrological Signs, which she published under another name with Tinderbox Editions in 2021. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, Poetry, The Margins, swamp pink, and other journals. She is a PhD student in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston, where she has received the Inprint Brown Foundation Fellowship.

In choosing Moon’s book, Olzmann says: “In poems that excavate the complexities and heartache of transnational, cross-cultural adoption, Bo Hee Moon has created a profound work of yearning and mystery. I love these poems for their clarity of vision and lyrical poignancy. And I love this Book for how the individual poems build upon each other and intensify one another, and how, through it all, they reach toward a powerful type of human connection.”

There were 922 manuscripts submitted to the prize this year, which our screeners narrowed to 20 additional finalists and eight semifinalists. It’s our opinion that every one of these manuscripts is outstanding and eminently publishable. With that in mind, the finalists were:

Hodges Adams, Not, Not
Adriana Beltrano, Heaven Then Information
Ja’net Danielo, Eclipse
zakia henderson-brown, The Body Losing Its Borders
Marilyn Johnson, Remnant tongue
Michael Juliani, The World Is Not Astonished
Arah Ko, Whatever We Began as We Became Something Else
Marianne Kunkel, Breastplate
Margaree Little, The Gargoyles of Saint-Chapelle
Angelo Mao, A White Horse Is Not a Horse
Neon Mashurov, Esc Dot Zip
Cameron McGill, Virga
Sara Michas-Martin, The Hand Arranging Stars
Carolyn Orosz, Not Long for This World
Michael Pontacoloni, Apartments
Amanda Quaid, No Obvious Distress
Maggie Queeney, The Patient
Jessica Ram, The Ethics of Care
Maya Salameh, If/Water
Frederick Speers, An*i*mus

The semifinalists were:

Holli Carrell, Apostasies
Mario Chard, Baffle Gate
Charlie Clark, The Fortunate World
Thomas Dooley, Made to Carry Your Fires
Lily Greenberg, Death, Yes, Life
Johanna Magin, Against Reason
Nicholas Regiacorte, Cyclorama
Hannah Smith, Common Prairie

And since screeners do essential—if too often unsung—evaluative work narrowing the field of entrants, we think it’s important to note each year who our screeners are (both to say thank you and in the interest of transparency). This year’s screeners were:

Brian Barker, author of Vanishing Acts
Chelsea B. DesAutels, author of A Dangerous Place
Stephanie Choi, author of The Lengest Neoi
Sarah Green, author of The Deletions
Wayne Miller, author of The End of Childhood
Tyler Mills, author of Hawk Parable
Weijia Pan, author of Motherlands
Iain Haley Pollock, author of All the Possible Bodies
Cintia Santana, author of The Disordered Alphabet
Chris Santiago, author of Small Wars Manual

Finally, we want to mention something briefly about our process: Since a number of entrants had previously published in Copper Nickel, and since other entrants knew one or more of our screeners on a personal level, we were sure to pass the manuscripts among the screeners until no one was tasked with screening work by anyone she had published or with whom she had a personal relationship. We believe strongly in running an ethical contest, and we work hard to ensure that we continue to do so.