Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry

ABOUT

The Brittingham Prize in Poetry and the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry are the two annual awards that anchor the University of Wisconsin Press's Wisconsin Poetry Series, one of the longer-running university-press poetry lines in the country. The series was launched in 1985 under longtime series editor and poet Ronald Wallace, whose decades of stewardship gave the list a consistent identity; the Pollak Prize was added later, named for Felix Pollak, the Austrian-born poet and University of Wisconsin-Madison rare-books librarian. Rather than running as separate competitions, the two prizes are drawn from a single annual submission pool, with the judges selecting two winning manuscripts for publication each year — a structure that has made the series a reliable, if quietly run, entry point for full-length poetry collections.

In practice, the press opens a submission window (recent cycles have opened in early-to-mid summer, per its own announcements) rather than accepting manuscripts year-round, so poets need to watch for the specific reading-period dates each year rather than assuming rolling submissions. Because one manuscript pool feeds both prizes, there is no separate application for the Brittingham versus the Pollak — you submit once and are automatically considered for both, with winners receiving cash awards and standard publication in the Wisconsin Poetry Series. The press's own site does not spell out current fee amounts, prize dollar figures, or response-time guarantees, so applicants should confirm those details directly on the submission-manager page at the time of the call rather than relying on older cached information.