2026 Clarion Poetry Prize
Sabr Tooth Tiger is thrilled to announce our first contest, the 2026 Clarion Poetry Prize, guest judged by Jaia Hamid Bashir.
Submissions open February 20th and close on March 7th, 2026, 11:59 PM CST. The entry fee is $10.
About
Legendary American singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley said grace is what matters in life, tragedy, pain, love, and death—grace under pressure, grace as endurance, the muscle that keeps reaching.
We seek poems that test and extend that claim. Work that embodies and risks, moving beyond Christian and Western vocabularies. Send poems that dwell in the ecotone between the sensuous and the divine, animate the sacred without diminishing it, explore the charged border between grotesque and holy, and ask:
How do we forgive?
How do we atone?
How do we reimagine the Beloved?
The prize’s name, Clarion, comes from the medieval trumpet, a call meant to carry. We want work that sounds like an announcement: clear, urgent, impossible to ignore.
Experimental and hybrid work welcome.
Guest Judge
We are honored to have esteemed poet Jaia Hamid Bashir judge the 2026 Clarion Poetry Prize.
Jaia Hamid Bashir, born to Pakistani immigrant artists, is the author of the poetry collection The Afterlife of Sweetness (Ohio State University Press, 2026) and the chapbook Desire/Halves (Nine Syllables, 2024). Her work appears in POETRY Magazine, The American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry Daily, Image, The Rumpus, The Oxonian Review, and Narrative. She is the recipient of the 2025 Ralph Hamilton Editors’ Prize (Rhino Poetry), the 2022 Best of the Net Award, and the 2020 Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize. A graduate of Columbia University, she lives in Utah with her husband.
Guidelines
The contest fee is $10, payable here on our website. Please include a screenshot of your payment alongside your work in the email to be considered. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable, but we cannot refund contest fees if you have to withdraw all or part of your submission.
Submit up to 3 previously unpublished poems, totaling no more than 5 pages, in a single .docx or PDF document. You may include a cover letter and brief bio no longer than 100 words in the body of your email to sabrtoothtigermag@gmail.com. Please remove all identifying information from the poems themselves, including your name. All contest submissions will be read anonymously.
Please title your file as LastName_ClarionPrize and subject line should include: 2026 Clarion Poetry Prize. It would assist us greatly if you can submit your work in EB Garamond, 11 pt, single-spaced.
Submissions are open internationally, to any poet writing in English. Inclusion of other languages is welcome, as long as the poem is primarily written in English. We will not accept AI-generated work for this contest.
The winner of the Clarion Poetry Prize will receive at least $100 and a featured interview. Two finalists will also be awarded $25. The winner and two finalists’ poems will be featured in Sabr Tooth Tiger Magazine, Issue no. 2: Mystics & Saints and each receive a complimentary print copy.
Process
We adhere to the CLMP Contest Code of Ethics.
For this contest, we cannot consider work from anyone currently or recently affiliated with the editor-in-chief Madeline Blair or the prize judge, Jaia Hamid Bashir. If you are unsure whether your relationship would make you ineligible, you may query us.
Clarion Poetry Prize entries are read and judged anonymously. Madeline Blair, will first read all prize submissions, free of any identifying information, and from these will select the finalists. The finalists’ work are then sent to Jaia Hamid Bashir, who selects a winner and two runners-up.
We proudly encourage submissions from poets of all identities, cultures, and backgrounds.
If the contest fee poses a significant barrier for you, please reach out, as we have a limited number of fee waivers we may grant. All fees go toward the prize winnings, and any leftover will assist in the costs of printing physical copies of the magazine.