Award-Winning Poems 2008
Winter 2008-09
WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET
by Theresa Sotto
Winner of the 2008 George Bogin Memorial Award
Postmark Deadline: December 22
This high-profile award from the Poetry Society of America offers $500 for a selection of four or five poems that use language in an original way to reflect the encounter of the ordinary and the extraordinary and to take a stand against oppression in any of its forms. Sotto's list-poem names articles of clothing that range from exotic traditional coverings to familiar pop-culture styles. As these uninhabited garments enter and exit the stage, we are led to consider self-display as a form of self-concealment.
THE WOODPECKER PECKS, BUT THE HOLE DOES NOT APPEAR
by Charles Wright
International Winner of the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: December 31
The most lucrative contest for a published English-language poetry book awards two prizes of $50,000 each year, one for a book of original or translated poetry first published in Canada this year, the other for a book published anywhere in the world. In this selection from Wright's winning collection Scar Tissue, the poet takes a philosophic pleasure in imagining how soon the memory of our individual lives will be lost in the self-renewing vitality of nature.
THE SUPPER STAR
by Anne Shaw
Co-winner of the 2008 Literal Latte Food Verse Awards
Postmark Deadline: December 31
Literal Latte, a well-regarded online journal with an innovative, urban feel, offers $500 and web publication for poems about food. Shaw's magical poem imagines feasting on the light of a star, and how this meal fills a person with a yearning to travel back to a primordial oneness of all beings.
ISLAND REMNANT
by Endi Bogue Hartigan
Winner of the 2008 Colorado Prize for Poetry
Postmark Deadline: January 12
This prestigious, competitive open poetry manuscript prize offers $2,000 and publication by a university press that is friendly to experimental work. Hartigan's One Sun Storm won the 2008 award. This cryptic, melancholy poem finds the protagonist carving a tiny wax horse as a sort of gesture of resistance to the chaotic ocean that "took the childhoods and the fields".
MY DAUGHTER ASKS ME WHAT THE SOUL IS
by Lisa Suhair Majaj
Winner of the 2008 Del Sol Press Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: January 15
This well-regarded independent press offers $1,200 for a manuscript of original poetry or translations. Reprinted from Majaj's prizewinning collection Geographies of Light, this poem finds that every mundane thing, from a child's unkempt hair to the olive trees in the yard, represents a small triumph of hope and survival.
SAINT CATHERINE IN AN O: A SONG ABOUT KNIVES
by Matthew Donovan
Winner of the 2008 Levis Reading Prize
Entries must be received by January 15
This $1,000 award from Virginia Commonwealth University honors a first or second book of poetry published in the previous calendar year. Donovan's prizewinning collection Vellum was published by Mariner Books after winning the 2006 Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. This richly textured poem interweaves beauty and brutality, finding connections between a saint's tale on an illuminated manuscript page and contemporary violence in the Sudan and elsewhere, and suggesting that the same imaginative impulse proliferates the tools of art and those of slaughter.
Fall 2008
BIRD PLAYS TO A COW
by Eric McHenry
Winner of the 2007 Kate Tufts Discovery Award
Postmark Deadline: September 15
This highly prestigious award from Claremont Graduate University offers $10,000 for a first published book of poetry by a US citizen or current resident. In this poem from McHenry's prizewinning collection Potscrubber Lullabies, jazz legend Charlie "Bird" Parker displays a cheerful humility about his vocation.
ARS POETICA
by Virginia Chase Sutton
Winner of the 2007 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: September 15
High-profile award for first or second books of poetry offers $1,000 and publication by Northeastern University Press. This darkly ironic poem from Sutton's prizewinning book What Brings You to Del Amo questions how the poetic imagination functions, or resists functioning, under psychiatric scrutiny.
BEST PRACTICES and other poems
by Justin Marks
Winner of the 2008 Green Rose Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: September 30
The prestigious literary journal New Issues offers this $2,000 manuscript prize for authors with prior book publication. These satirical poems from Marks' collection A Million in Prizes apply the language of market research to the creative process, generating a claustrophobic atmosphere where nothing is immune from bureaucratic surveillance.
DINNER FOR THRESHERS
by Andrew Grace
Winner of the 2008 Journal Award in Poetry
Postmark Deadline: September 30
Ohio State Press offers this $3,000 prize for poetry manuscripts, open to all authors. Andrew Grace's Shadeland won the 2008 prize (deadline in 2007). In this poem, based on a Grant Wood painting, he brings to life both the harshness and the rich physicality of the farmworkers' world, where daily life is so marginal that dinner becomes a sacrament.
ON BECOMING LIGHT
by Bill Rasmovicz
Winner of the 2006 Kinereth Gensler Award
Postmark Deadline: October 1
Poets in New York, New Jersey and New England are eligible for this $2,000 manuscript prize offered by Alice James Books. In this delicate, elegiac poem from Rasmovicz' prizewinning collection The World in Place of Itself, a moth's attraction to a porch light reveals both the placid beauty of nature and the fact that its vitality comes from creatures driven by desire to the point of self-obliteration.
FARTHEST FLAME
by Lisa Williams
Winner of the 2007 Barnard College New Women Poets Prize
Postmark Deadline: October 15
This $1,500 prize for a second collection of poems by a woman includes publication by W.W. Norton & Co. In this poem from her prizewinning book Woman Reading to the Sea, Williams reminds us of the divine otherness of the sun, in that all life relies on it, yet nothing could come close to its surface and survive.
THE ORB WEB
by David Culwell
Winner of the 2008 Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred
Postmark Deadline: December 31
This free contest named for 20th-century Christian mystic Thomas Merton offers $500 for a poem that "expresses, directly or indirectly, a sense of the holy or that, by its mode of expression, evokes the sacred." In Culwell's winning poem from the 2008 contest (deadline in 2007), the speaker contemplates destroying a spiderweb across his doorway, and ends by questioning the centrality of his human agenda.
Summer 2008
HOLY GHOST and AFTER THE ACCIDENT
by Brian Brodeur
Winner of the 2007 Akron Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: June 30
This open manuscript contest includes $1,500 and publication by the University of Akron Press. In these poems from Brodeur's prizewinning Other Latitudes, closely observed moments of family life unfold in slow motion, invested with a significance that hovers just out of reach.
HORIZON LINE
by Ely Shipley
Winner of the 2007 Barrow Street Press Book Contest
Postmark Deadline: June 30
This prestigious open manuscript contest from a press that is friendly to experimental poetry offers $1,000 and publication. Shipley's Boy With Flowers won the 2007 award. In this poem, an aunt's story about the scar on her neck plunges the child into a dizzying meditation on the fragile boundaries between memory and experience, the body and the world.
ALZHEIMER'S
by Sean Nevin
Winner of the 2007 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry - First Book Award
Postmark Deadline: July 1
This high-profile award offers $3,500 and publication by Southern Illinois University Press for a first collection of poetry. Nevin's book Oblivio Gate centers on a Korean War veteran who has developed Alzheimer's dementia. In this brief, lyrical poem, a soldier wanders through a confusing yet strangely beautiful winter landscape, where erasure of memory may clear the way for healing.
NATIONAL POETRY MONTH and BLURB
by Kevin Griffith
Winner of the 2006 Pearl Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: July 15
This $1,000 poetry manuscript award from an attractive small press publishes many first books, though the contest is open to all writers. These offbeat prose poems from Griffith's prizewinning collection Denmark, Kangaroo, Orange gently satirize some institutions of the poetry business.
Spring 2008
LATIN ROOTS SUI AND CIDIUM
by Deborah Bernhardt
Winner of the 2004 Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry
Postmark Deadline: March 31
This prestigious first-book contest for poetry manuscripts, with a $1,000 prize, is offered in even-numbered years only. Excerpted from Bernhardt's prizewinning Echolalia, this elliptical poem puzzles over the permutations of a fraught word, in fragmented images suggesting that the roots of the deed, as opposed to the word, must remain a mystery.
FOR A PLAIN MAN
by Marianne Burton
Winner of the 2006 Mslexia Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by April 25
Mslexia, a British journal for women writers, offers prizes up to 1,000 pounds for unpublished poems by women. Overseas entries may be sent online. Burton's compassionate character sketch ends with a hard truth about the persistence of childhood shame.
VELOCITY
by Nancy Krygowski
Winner of the 2006 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: April 30
The University of Pittsburgh Press offers $5,000 and publication for a first collection of poems. This title poem from Krygowski's prizewinning book uses taut, factual narration to hold a traumatic event at arm's length and express the narrator's will to survive.
NEGROTIZING IN FIVE OR HOW TO WRITE A BLACK POEM
by Dawn Lundy Martin
Winner of the 2006 Cave Canem Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by May 16; don't enter before March 17
This well-regarded award series offers $500 and publication for a first collection of poetry by an African-American author. In Martin's poem, from her prizewinning book A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering, the speaker for a silenced people assembles a language of witness out of wounds, riddles, and invented sounds.
A POEM BEFORE WE FACE THE BUSINESS OF DEATH
by Lorraine Healy
Winner of the 2007 Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: May 31
This long-running prize from the journal Calyx offers $300 for unpublished poems by women. In Healy's poem, rich with personal and political history, a daughter reflects on the cultural heritage and indomitable spirit that binds her aging mother to her across years and distance.
WAITING FOR PENTECOST and other poems
by Nancy Craig Zarzar
Winner of Main Street Rag's Annual Chapbook Contest for 2007
Postmark Deadline: May 31
This spirited independent press publishes numerous runners-up as well as the winner of its $500 chapbook manuscript prize. The title poem from Zarzar's winning collection uses lush fairy-tale imagery to depict a marriage where intimacy—sometimes delicious, sometimes frightening—is present but communication is lacking.
