Award-Winning Poems 2009
Winter 2009-10
ANNUS MIRABILIS
by Richard Deming
Winner of the 2009 Norma Farber First Book Award
Postmark Deadline: December 22
This prestigious award from the Poetry Society of America offers $500 for a first published book of poetry by a US author. Deming's Let's Not Call It Consequence was published by Shearsman Books in 2008. This melancholy, sensual poem from his collection asks whether savoring the present moment can compensate for a loss of faith in anything beyond this world.
THREE SEVERANCE SONGS
by Joshua Corey
Winner of the 2008 Tupelo Press Dorset Prize
Postmark Deadline: December 31
This highly competitive award offers $3,000 and publication by a leading independent press. In these selections from Corey's prizewinning Severance Songs, recurring themes of rain and moisture seem to symbolize the way that human connections are intensely felt yet elusive and always about to evaporate.
THE BODY AS WEAPON, AS INSPIRATION and other poems
by Paul Martínez Pompa
Winner of the 2008 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: January 15
The University of Notre Dame sponsors this biennial free contest (even-numbered years only) that offers $1,000 and publication for a first book of poetry by a Latino author. US citizens and permanent residents only. Paul Martínez Pompa's My Kill Adore Him won the 2008 award. This selection of poems traces how violence and oppression send shock waves from one side of the world to the other, reaching from the Middle East to the inner city, and finally to the poet who bears witness.
PAVLOV'S CAT
by Francine Witte
Winner of the 2009 Pecan Grove National Chapbook Contest
Postmark Deadline: January 15
This poetry chapbook prize includes $250 and publication by Pecan Grove Press, an imprint of St. Mary's University in San Antonio, TX. This poem from Witte's prizewinning First Rain offers a subtle, acerbic perspective on keeping one's self aloof from love.
Fall 2009
THE YEAR WE BLEW UP THE WHALE - FLORENCE, OREGON
by Nick Lantz
Winner of the 2009 Felix Pollak Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: September 30
The University of Wisconsin Press offers this long-running, prestigious poetry manuscript contest with a $1,000 prize. This bleakly matter-of-fact narrative from Lantz's collection Asymptote catalogues how suffering often finds its outlet in self-defeating violence.
CRETE and other poems
by L.S. Klatt
Winner of the 2008 Juniper Prize for Poetry
Postmark Deadline: September 30
This $1,500 award from the University of Massachusetts Press alternates between a first-book prize (deadlines in odd-numbered years) and a prize for subsequent books (deadlines in even-numbered years). Klatt's Interloper won the 2008 award. These compressed, enigmatic poems juxtapose figures of privilege and deprivation occupying a single moment in time, leaving the uneasy reader to make sense of the tension between them.
MOLT and other poems
by Claire Hero
Winner of the 2007 Caketrain Chapbook Competition
Postmark Deadline: October 1
This $250 prize from the literary journal Caketrain alternates between fiction and poetry chapbooks (2009 is poetry). In this selection from Hero's innovative collection afterpastures, the darkness and strangeness of animal consciousness is captured in densely textured words used in unusual ways (such as "foxing" as a verb).
RIVER LEGS
by Jen McClanaghan
Winner of the 2009 Georgetown Review Contest
Postmark Deadline: October 1
The literary journal of Georgetown College in Kentucky offers this $1,000 prize for poetry, fiction, or essays, any length, with publication for about two dozen runners-up. McClanaghan's catalog of misfit wonders is inspired by tenderness toward unclaimed body parts in a morgue.
NOCTURNE
by Jennifer K. Sweeney
Winner of the 2009 Perugia Press Intro Award
Postmark Deadline: November 15
This competitive award offers $1,000 and publication for a first or second book of poetry by a woman. This brief lyric from Sweeney's How to Live on Bread and Music suggests that we can choose to hear, or not hear, the poetry inherent in our surroundings.
THE TAILOR OF AL HAMDANIYAH
by Eliot Khalil Wilson
Winner of the 2009 Robert H. Winner Memorial Award
Postmark Deadline: December 22 (don't enter before October 1)
The Poetry Society of America offers this high-profile award of $2,500 for poems by an author over age 40 who has published no more than one book. Wilson's poem recounts a wartime atrocity with anger and compassion that burn all the more fiercely because of his restrained language.
Summer 2009
WHAT MY FATHER LEFT BEHIND
by Chris Forhan
Winner of the 2008 Barrow Street Press Book Contest
Postmark Deadline: June 30
This competitive $1,000 award for poetry manuscripts is sponsored by a well-regarded literary journal that is friendly to experimental work. In this poem from Forhan's prizewinning Black Leapt In, he writes tenderly of the objects that retain the presence of his late father, who himself has transcended such attachments.
PINOCCHIO
by Ted Gilley
Winner of the 2008 Happy Hour Poetry Awards
Postmark Deadline: July 1
The poetry journal Alehouse offers prizes up to $1,000 in this contest for unpublished poems. Gilley's prizewinning entry imagines the famous wooden puppet as a mind in transition between nature and humanity.
THE ANTS' PART IN OPENING THE PEONY
by Judith Frost
Winner of the October 2008 Canadian Christian Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: July 31
This quarterly contest from Utmost Christian Writers offers prizes up to C$250 and web publication for unpublished poems by Canadian Christian authors. Themes change each quarter; the July 2009 prompt is "Make Us Laugh". Frost's delicate poem about traces of the divine in nature was written in response to the prompt "Where is God?"
#9 (from ROUGE STATE)
by Rodney Koeneke
Winner of the 2002 Transcontinental Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: August 15
This poetry manuscript prize for authors with no published books of poetry or prose offers $1,000 and publication by Pavement Saw, a well-regarded independent press with a taste for witty, experimental and genre-bending work. Koeneke's Rouge State, the 2002 winner, was among the first published full-length books of flarf, an avant-garde poetic movement launched in 2001. Flarf typically involves ironic and absurd combinations of words and online search terms, with the intent to satirize contemporary politics and popular culture.
Spring 2009
POEM
by Lucy Ives
Winner of the 2008 Slope Editions Annual Book Prize
Postmark Deadline: March 15
Slope Editions, an independent press that welcomes surreal and experimental work, offers this $1,000 prize for poetry manuscripts by US authors. Ives' collection Anamnesis won the 2008 award. In this stream-of-consciousness poem, the speaker seeks to outrun the sensations and thoughts that keep her from experiencing the freedom of pure awareness, yet her lyrical language renews the allure of the experiences that keep her (and the reader) from focusing.
"MEMORY BELIEVES BEFORE KNOWING REMEMBERS"
by Shelby Stephenson
Winner of the 2008 Bellday Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: March 16
This open poetry manuscript prize offers $2,000 and publication by Bellday Books, a small press that specializes in contemporary American experimental poetry. In this selection from Stephenson's prizewinning Family Matters: Homage to July, the Slave Girl, scenes from the backbreaking daily routine of a slave family are interwoven with glimpses of the dreams and rivalries of their descendants.
AT THE EDGE OF A DEEP, DARK WOOD, RE-PURPOSED DOLPHIN SPEAKS
by Marc McKee
Winner of the 2008 Diagram Chapbook Contest
Postmark Deadline: March 27
Quirky multimedia journal offers $1,000 for a poetry or prose chapbook manuscript (all genres compete together). McKee's What Apocalypse? won the 2008 prize. In this poem, whose associative leaps imitate the dizzying pace of technological change, one of science's more bizarre creations gives voice to the absurdity and poignancy of our efforts to bring the world under rational control.
PASSING NOTES
by Carol Rogers
Winner of the Autumn 2008 JBWB Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by March 31
Jacqui Bennett Writers Bureau, a British writer's website, offers this quarterly poetry contest with prizes up to 100 pounds. Rogers' tender lyric imagines the last moments of a dying woman.
LOVE POEM TO SINISTER MOMENTS
by Catherine Pierce
Winner of the 2007 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: March 31
This open poetry manuscript prize offers $2,000 and publication by a well-regarded independent press. In this playful poem from her prizewinning collection Famous Last Words, Pierce reminds us why destruction can be so seductive.
DESCARTES' NIGHTMARE
by Susan McCabe
Winner of the 2007 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry
Postmark Deadline: April 15
This competitive open manuscript prize offers $1,000 and publication by the University of Utah Press. In the title poem from her prizewinning book, McCabe imagines the scientist-philosopher as a voyeur who is both fascinated and repelled by the chaotic abundance of the material world.
IRON
by Michael McGriff
Winner of the 2007 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: April 15
The University of Pittsburgh Press offers this long-running, prestigious first-book contest with a $5,000 prize. In this hard-hitting poem from McGriff's Dismantling the Hills, a man who escaped the grind of a small logging town addresses his memory of a girl who was not so lucky.
FLOWER BOMB
by Vuong Quoc Vu
Winner of the Poetry 2007 International Poetry Competition (Atlanta Review)
Postmark Deadline: May 8
The prestigious literary journal Atlanta Review offers this competitive prize for unpublished poems. Beauty and horror combine in Vuong Quoc Vu's prizewinning poem, in which a war veteran contemplates the fragility of the human body and mind.
