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Award-Winning Poems: Spring 2016
Welcome to my Spring 2016 selection of award-winning poems, highlights from our contest archives, and the best new resources we've found for writers. These quarterly specials are included with your free Winning Writers Newsletter subscription.
In this issue: "When You Are Old" by W. B. Yeats, illustrated in manga style by Julian Peters.
—Jendi Reiter, Editor
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Deadlines Next Month!
WERGLE FLOMP HUMOR POETRY CONTEST - NO FEE
Deadline: April 1. 15th year. $2,250 in prizes, including a top award of $1,000. Final judge: Jendi Reiter. Previously published work accepted. See last year's winners and enter here.
TOM HOWARD/JOHN H. REID FICTION & ESSAY CONTEST
Deadline: April 30. 24th year. $4,000 in prizes, including two top awards of $1,500 each. Fee: $18 per entry. Arthur Powers will judge. Previously published work accepted. See last year's winners and enter here.
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SUTRA
by Ben Jackson
Winner of the 2015 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry
Postmark Deadline: March 15
This $2,000 prize for unpublished poems commemorates an important 20th-century American poet. The narrator of this gritty, moving poem reflects on his mother's lessons, losses, and imperfections as she is dying from a cancer that could be related to industrial pollution.
from BOOK OF HOURS
by Kevin Young
Winner of the 2015 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: May 15
The Academy of American Poets awards this prestigious $25,000 prize for the best book of poetry published in the US during the previous calendar year. In this excerpt from the title poem of Young's winning collection, long-drawn-out sentences in short lines convey how the passage of time feels to impatient or grief-heavy human beings, compared with the patient wisdom of mountains and weather.
POLICE REPORT
by Dave Nielsen
Winner of the 2015 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry
Entries must be received by May 15
Lynx House Press awards $2,000 and publication for a poetry collection by a US author, which includes foreign nationals living and writing in the US and US citizens living abroad. Nielsen's Unfinished Figures won the most recent contest. This timely poem envisions adult authority confounded by a child's sacred, risky innocence.
PLEDGE
by Elizabeth Astrid Powell
Winner of the 2015 Robert Dana–Anhinga Prize for Poetry
Entries must be received by May 20
This long-running contest gives $2,000 and publication by Anhinga Press for a poetry manuscript. Powell's collection Willy Loman's Reckless Daughter won the most recent award. In this poem from her first book, The Republic of Self, she playfully imagines the Pledge of Allegiance as a wedding vow, to depict a child's way of bringing peculiar adult ideas down to a personal level.
KADDISH (FOR LUCIEN STRYK)
by Susan Azar Porterfield
Winner of the 2015 Cider Press Review Editors' Prize Book Award
Postmark Deadline: June 30 (don't enter before April 1)
This award from a well-regarded literary journal gives $1,000 and publication for a poetry manuscript. Porterfield's Dirt, Root, Silk won the most recent contest. A Kaddish is a Jewish prayer of praise for God, traditionally recited to honor the dead. In this poem, the speaker communes with her friend's memory by being fully present to observe a bird on a branch, entering a reality where no one is separate.
Read more award-winning poems.
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FISH is an open door inviting writers to walk through.
—Roddy Doyle
Deadline: March 31. Top prize: 1,000 euros. Second prize: a week at the Anam Cara Writer's & Artist's Retreat. Poems should be 300 words or less. Submission fee: 14 euros.
The Fish Poetry Prize was established in 2006. Previous judges include Billy Collins, Brian Turner, Leanne O'Sullivan, Michael McCarthy, Peter Fallon, Matthew Sweeney, Paul Durcan, Ruth Padel and Nick Laird.
This year's judge, poet Dave Lordan, will be selecting the 10 poems to be published in the 2016 Fish Anthology. The contest results will be announced on May 15. The anthology will be launched during the West Cork Literary Festival in July.
Learn more about the contest and enter here.
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The 2016 Elk River Writers Workshop is accepting applications for its August 8-11 summer workshop at Chico Hot Springs in Montana's Paradise Valley. This second annual event brings prominent writers together with advanced writing students in a small group environment. This year's faculty includes 2016 Henry David Thoreau Prize winner Linda Hogan, Pulitzer Prize nominee Craig Lesley, and New York Times bestselling fiction authors Nina McConigley and Jamie Ford.
Students will work with the faculty member of their choice in a traditional workshop, a generative seminar, or a master class. Classes are capped at ten students. Additional events include craft talks by each faculty member, evening lectures by award-winning authors, opportunities for student readings, and a trail ride or raft trip adventure. The workshop will culminate with a gala faculty reading.
Rolling admissions will close when full or on June 1, whichever comes first. Three scholarships are available (one general, one Native American, and one for a Park County high school writer in residence). To learn more and apply, visit ElkRiverWriters.org or email ElkRiverWriters@gmail.com.
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There are gremlins out there determined to keep your work from being published, your book from being promoted. Resolved to embarrass you in front of the gatekeepers who can turn the key of success, they lurk in your subconscious and the depths of your computer programs.
Whether you are a new or experienced author, The Frugal Editor, 2nd edition—from Carolyn Howard-Johnson's multiple award-winning HowToDoItFrugally series of books for writers—will help you present whistle-clean copy (from a one-page cover letter to your entire manuscript) to those who have the power to say "yea" or "nay". Buy it now for $9 at Amazon.
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Arthur Powers is judging this year's Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest. His award-winning collection of short stories, A Hero for the People, is available on Amazon Kindle. Click to buy—just $0.99!
"Set in the vast and sometimes violent landscape of contemporary Brazil, this is a gorgeous collection of stories—wise, hopeful, and forgiving, but clear-eyed in its exploration of the toll taken on the human heart by greed, malice, and the lust for land." —Debra Murphy, Publisher, Idylls Press
"Arthur Powers is more than a totally captivating, adventurous storyteller. He is a wonderfully accomplished writer who enriches the reader's experience of life, and is a mighty skillful reporter who knows the ins and outs of people and places. While his locations are often fascinatingly exotic, more importantly his people are always engagingly real! In short, Powers is in that rare company of authors who are impossible to put down!" —John Reid, founder of the Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest
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Ellen LaFleche, a judge of the North Street Book Prize, explores the emotional life of a semi-cloistered nun in this chapbook from Tiger's Eye Press. Sister Beatrice serves on a jury, bakes bread in the convent kitchen, scatters her mother's ashes in the ocean, and reflects on her friendship with another nun. Order directly from Ms. LaFleche for $10 at
ElLaFleche@aol.com.
"The tides of the sacred feminine seek an outlet in the cloistered body of Sister Beatrice, a working-class mystic. The convent offers both refuge and confinement—the paradox of a women-ruled society where women must de-sexualize themselves. The ascetic environment cannot quench the vitality of Beatrice's imagination, which finds golden-faced gods in copper pans and lust's soft satisfaction in a raw quahog."
—Jendi Reiter, editor, Winning Writers, and author of Bullies in Love
Please enjoy "Bliss" and "Forbidden Fruit", sample poems from the chapbook.
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The latest mystery thriller in The Edisto Island Mysteries from C. Hope Clark
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–Karen White, New York Times Bestselling Author, www.karen-white.com
Buy Edisto Jinx at Amazon.
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Winning Writers editor Jendi Reiter and Little Red Tree Publishing are pleased to offer Bullies in Love, Reiter's fourth poetry book and second full-length collection, with illustrations by fine art photographer and Massachusetts Cultural Council award winner Toni Pepe. Bullies in Love
is on sale at Little Red Tree and Amazon.
Little Red Tree publishes books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and art that "delight, entertain, and educate". Visit their website at littleredtree.com.
"An outstanding, impressive collection from a multiple award winner...The writing dazzles, surprises, and beguiles the reader with its unexpected vistas."
—Carol Smallwood, author, Divining the Prime Meridian (Wordtech Editions, 2015)
"Bitter, tender, contained, full of pain and hilarity, this fiercely intelligent collection begins with one of the most beautiful poems I have ever read. 'Inconsolable joy,' Reiter writes to her newborn son. 'Motherless, I mother.' Within this grace all questions resolve: 'Each glinting wavelet a day of my history,/washing my hands as I lose it.' The history to be known and released includes childhood abuse, and cruelties both familial and social...In these poems, theology becomes concrete and passionate."
—Ruth Thompson, author of Woman with Crows (Saddle Road Press, 2013), A Room of Her Own Foundation "To the Lighthouse" Prize Finalist
Please enjoy this sample poem from Bullies in Love, "Lost Cat".
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See our Books page for all of our recommended poetry, fiction, and nonfiction books.
Alexander Chee
EDINBURGH
In this poetic debut novel, a sexually abusive choir director forever alters the lives of a gay Korean-American youth and the friends he loves. The protagonist finds healing through artistic imagination, the survival stories of his refugee family, and taking responsibility for the dark side of his own desires.
Don Mitchell
A RED WOMAN WAS CRYING
Humorous, poignant, and enlightening, these linked short stories are set among the Nagovisi people of Bougainville Island in the Southwestern Pacific. The young American anthropologist in their midst learns as much about himself as about the villagers who have indulgently accepted him as an oddball member of their community. He mourns the collateral damage wrought on this small but culturally rich island by international wars and mining companies.
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Literacy for Social Change is a model of instruction that incorporates literacy lessons into community action projects. As residents work on projects to improve their communities— everything from digging clean water wells, overseeing reforestation projects, and disease prevention to promoting human rights, starting health clinics, and forming business ventures—program staff incorporate lessons on reading, writing, and basic math into the projects. Learn more and access resources at the ProLiteracy Education Network.
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