Award-Winning Poems 2007
Winter 2007-08
MATRYOSHKA and IZAAK LAUGHING
by Barbara Louise Ungar
Winner of the 2006 Gival Press Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: December 15
This open poetry manuscript prize offers $1,000 and publication by an independent press that is interested in work with a social or philosophical message. These poems from Ungar's prizewinning collection The Origin of the Milky Way juxtapose the sensuality and peace of motherhood with concern for the fate of the planet.
EXTINCTION and other poems
by Sandra Meek
Winner of the 2006 Tupelo Press Dorset Prize
Postmark Deadline: December 15
Competitive open manuscript prize from acclaimed independent press offers $10,000 and publication. Meek's collection Biogeography won the most recent award. These spare, crystalline poems explore the constant change and decay of all natural phenomena.
CUBE
by Dan Boehl
Winner of the 2006-07 Pavement Saw Press Chapbook Award
Postmark Deadline: December 31
This $500 prize for a poetry chapbook is offered by a well-established independent press that favors experimental and offbeat work. This poem from Boehl's winning collection Work takes a surreal, humorous look at life in the cubicle farm.
TEN MOVIES AND BOOKS
by Craig Morgan Teicher
Winner of the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry
Postmark Deadline: January 11
This prestigious, competitive open poetry manuscript prize offers $1,500 and publication by a university press that is friendly to experimental work. In this witty poem from Teicher's winning collection Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems, disjointed capsule summaries of unnamed classic movies and books turn out to be more about the reader's bewilderment and longing than about the books themselves.
THE CONCRETE RIVER
by Luis J. Rodriguez
Winner of the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: February 1
Free contest offers $1,000 for the best book of poetry published during the previous calendar year. Recent winners have been well-established poets with several books published. Rodriguez' prizewinning collection of new and selected poems, My Nature Is Hunger, includes selections from his acclaimed 1991 book The Concrete River. This raw, powerful title poem depicts boys in the East L.A. ghetto transforming their blasted urban landscape the only way they know how.
JUST AS YOU ARE IN ME AND I AM IN YOU
by Jan Wood
Winner of the 2007 Utmost Christian Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: February 28
Canadian writers' site offers good-sized prizes up to C$1,000 and web publication for poems on any theme, secular or religious, by writers who consider themselves Christian believers. Wood's graceful poem chronicles a photographer's search for images of God indwelling in us.
Fall 2007
SADNESS
by Theodore Worozbyt
Winner of the 2007 Juniper Prize for Poetry
Postmark Deadline: September 29
This prestigious manuscript contest, offering $1,500 and publication by the University of Massachusetts Press, alternates between a first-book prize (deadlines in odd-numbered years) and prize for subsequent books (deadlines in even-numbered years); thus, the contest that closes September 29, 2007 is open to authors with no prior published poetry books of 45+ pages. Worozbyt, author of the prizewinning collection Letters of Transit (forthcoming in 2008), gently puts a well-known poetic mood in perspective in this eloquent poem.
AQUARIUM
by Susanna Childress
Winner of the 2005 Brittingham Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: September 30
The University of Wisconsin Press sponsors the Brittingham and Pollak Poetry Prizes, two open manuscript contests offering $1,000, a $1,500 honorarium for reading in Madison, WI, and publication. This tenderly erotic poem from Childress' prizewinning collection Jagged With Love imagines the boundaries of self and species dissolving in the primal waters of intimacy.
OUTSIDE THE HORSE
by F. Daniel Rzicznek
Winner of the 2007 May Swenson Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: September 30
This high-profile open manuscript contest offers $1,000 and publication by Utah State University Press. This poem from Rzicznek's prizewinning collection Neck of the World explores the landscape of associations—some bucolic, some sinister—that the brain automatically creates around a familiar phrase.
ALLEGORY
by Jenny Mueller
Winner of the 2006 Elixir Poetry Book Awards: Editor's Prize
Postmark Deadline: October 31
Well-regarded independent publisher Elixir Press offers an open poetry manuscript award with a Judge's Prize of $2,500 and an Editor's Prize of $1,500. This charming poem from Mueller's prizewinning collection Bonneville imagines the sounds and moods of the world as interpreted by a variety of birds.
THIGH
by Roger Sedarat
Winner of the 2006 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: October 31
This open poetry manuscript contest offers $1,000 and publication by Ohio University Press, a well-regarded literary publisher. This sensual, poignant poem about a woman bathing in a river, from his prizewinning collection Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic, suggests that impurity is in the eye of the beholder, not in the veiled body.
TABLEAU
by Rebecca Dunham
Winner of the 2006 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry
Postmark Deadline: October 31
Truman State University Press offers this open poetry manuscript prize of $2,000 for collections that "honor T.S. Eliot's intellectual and artistic legacy". This mystical yet earthy Christmas poem evokes the perils and promise of bringing forth new life in a season of darkness. Dunham's collection The Miniature Room won the 2006 award.
From JOURNAL: RAI'UT COMA WARD, TEL AVIV-YAFFO, JULY 2003
by Yerra Sugarman
Winner of the 2007 Cecil Hemley Memorial Award
Postmark Deadline: December 21 (don't enter before October 1)
This $500 award from the Poetry Society of America, for poems addressing a philosophical or epistemological concern, is open to members only (we recommend joining). Sugarman's elegiac poem is rich with images of light and growth, as nature's cycles offer silent comfort to mourners when human words fail.
Summer 2007
DEPARTING, ARRIVING and other poems
by Vern Rutsala
Winner of the 2004 Akron Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: June 30
This high-profile open poetry manuscript prize from the University of Akron Press offers $1,000 and publication for collections that demonstrate "mastery of language, maturity of feeling, and complexity of thought." This poignant opening poem from Rutsala's prizewinning book How We Spent Our Time captures the unreality and loss of control that we feel in airports, as in hospitals.
THIS BIG FAKE WORLD
by Ada Limon
Winner of the 2005 Pearl Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: July 15
This open poetry manuscript award of $1,000 and publication is sponsored by an attractive small press that publishes many first books and is open to political and feminist work. The title poem from Limon's prizewinning collection cuts through the kitsch and debris of everyday life to find the yearning for love that unites us.
DYSTONIA
by David Keplinger
Winner of the 2005 Erskine J. Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: August 15
$200 prize from the journal Smartish Pace includes print and online publication. Online entries accepted. Alive with dramatic tension and tender hope, this poem takes the reader inside the mind and body of legendary pianist Leon Fleischer as he confronts a neurological disorder that cripples his hand.
NIGHT WITHOUT THIEVES
by Christian Hawkey
Winner of the 2006 Kate Tufts Discovery Award
Postmark Deadline: September 15
This prestigious free contest offers $10,000 for a first book of poetry published in the previous 12 months by a US citizen or current resident. This poem from Hawkey's prizewinning The Book of Funnels (Wave Books, 2004) encourages fearlessness by taking the reader through a landscape of surreal and marvelous changes, in language that subtly alludes to Jesus' warning that God's kingdom arrives like a thief in the night.
Spring 2007
AROUND THE BLOCK OF THE WORLD and THE SAMOVAR
by Veronica Patterson
Co-winner of the 2006 Campbell Corner Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: March 15
This award from Sarah Lawrence College offers $3,000 and a public reading at Poets House for poems that "treat larger themes with lyric intensity". Previously published work accepted. These evocative poems show the interpenetration of past and present, living and dead, as the speaker finds unexpected joy in a conversation with her dying mother or re-experiences the history of her family while contemplating a samovar.
DEAR BLACKBIRD 1
by Jane Springer
Winner of the 2006 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry
Postmark Deadline: March 31
Competitive open manuscript contest includes $1,000 and publication by the University of Utah Press. This title poem from Springer's prizewinning collection is a haunting letter to the blackbird who has flown away, from the scarecrow who remains in an autumn landscape that is giving way to winter's death. "When the crows descended, I welcomed them."
ON YOUR BRILLIANT ESCAPE
by John Gallaher
Winner of the 2005 Four Way Books Levis Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: March 31
Prestigious manuscript prize, offered in odd-numbered years only, is open to US authors with prior book publication. This enigmatic poem from Gallaher's prizewinning The Little Book of Guesses puts the reader in the position of a godlike voyeur, viewing romance and metamorphosis "in the city of the made-up city," where nothing stays the right size for long.
SITUATION IN YELLOW and LAST EVENING OF THE YEAR
by Stephanie Anderson
Winner of the 2006 Diagram Chapbook Contest
Postmark Deadline: April 2
New Michigan Press offers $1,000 and publication for a chapbook of poetry, fiction, essay, mixed-genre, or genre-bending work. Images can be included. In this selection from Anderson's prizewinning In the Particular Particular, measuring instruments become conduits of suppressed emotion, their specificity standing out in contrast to the human protagonists' facelessness and silence.
OUR FORGOTTEN LANGUAGE and THE OTHER MAN
by Michael Meyerhofer
Winner of the 2005 Copperdome Poetry Chapbook Award
Postmark Deadline: May 1 (extended from February 15)
Southeast Missouri State University Press awards $300 and publication for the best poetry chapbook manuscript. Meyerhofer's chapbook Cardboard Urn won the 2005 contest. He is also the winner of the 2006 Liam Rector First Book Prize for Poetry (deadline March 30) from Briery Creek Press for his full-length collection, Leaving Iowa. These bittersweet, reckless yet wise poems about the end of an affair reveal the many varieties of incompatible love.
THE BLACKBOARD OF HIS EYELID
by Michael Bassett
Winner of the 2006 Fugue Annual Contest in Prose and Poetry
Postmark Deadline: May 1
Fugue, the literary journal of the University of Idaho, offers prizes of $1,000 apiece for unpublished poetry and prose (alternates between fiction in even-numbered and essays in odd-numbered years). This disturbing poem views the world through the eyes of an uncanny child who is the victim of bullying.
WAR STORIES
by Gail Griffin
Winner of the 2006 Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: May 31
Calyx: A Journal of Art & Literature by Women offers this prestigious $300 prize for unpublished poems by female authors. No simultaneous submissions. Griffin's passionate poem eviscerates the myths that men teach their sons to make them love war.
BEAUTY
by Laura LeHew
Winner of the 2006 People Before Profits Poetry Prize (renamed the Burning Bush Poetry Prize in 2007)
Postmark Deadline: June 1
This award offers $200 for poetry that "inspires others to value human life and the natural world instead of values based on short-term economic advantage" and "speaks for community-centered values". LeHew's winning poem finds political resonance in the story of Sleeping Beauty, elegantly combining a dream-like loveliness with an invigorating call to take responsibility for our world.
