The LemonLight Longlist
One hundred poets. Three thousand poems. The inaugural prize takes its first shape.
We closed the LemonLight Prize in May with 706 entries — more than 3,500 poems submitted from across eight countries — and we’ve spent the weeks since reading them carefully, without rushing.
Today, we’re announcing the longlist.
One hundred poets have been selected from those 706 entries. You can find the full list at the link below, and we hope you’ll take a moment to read it — not just to look for your own name, but to register what the list represents. These are one hundred writers who submitted serious, ambitious work on a theme that asked something of them, and the range of what came back was genuinely remarkable.
The LemonLight Longlist — 100 Poets →
From this longlist, fifty poets will be selected for the shortlist, announced in early July. Those fifty poets will each have a poem included in The LemonLight Prize 2026 Anthology — a limited edition of 250 copies, produced to the same standard we bring to everything we publish. The prize winner and four honorable mentions will be announced in early August.
Judging is conducted blind throughout, by Leila Chatti.
If you’re on the longlist: congratulations, and thank you for the quality of what you sent. If you submitted and aren’t on the list: we read everything, and there was no easy cut. The standard made every stage of the process harder, and that’s a good problem to have.
The anthology pre-order is open. Half the print run of 250 copies has already been claimed.
Ink & Ribbon Press is a nonprofit poetry publisher based on Bainbridge Island, Washington. The LemonLight Prize is our annual award for a single poem — $3,000 to the winner, honorable mentions recognized in the anthology.
