Award-Winning Poems 2011
Winter 2011-12
AT THE IMPERIAL PALACE
by Suji Kwock Kim
Winner of the 2011 George Bogin Memorial Award
Postmark Deadline: December 22
This long-running, prestigious award from the Poetry Society of America offers $500 for a group of 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. Kim's unflinching poem testifies to the horrors of a repressive regime through the voices of servants who clean up the evidence of its off-stage excesses.
MENDOCINO and other poems
by Charles Douthat
Winner of the 2011 L.L. Winship Award
Postmark Deadline: December 31
PEN New England offers this $1,000 prize for published books of poetry, fiction, or nonfiction with a New England author or setting. Douthat's Blue for Oceans won the 2011 poetry award (for books published in 2010). These lyric poems pay tribute to love's persistence in memory, even as we accept the passing of the days that "whispered through us".
THE LAZARUS DREAM
by David Mohan
Winner of the 2010 Gemini Magazine Poetry Open
Postmark Deadline: January 3
This online literary journal offers prizes up to $1,000 for unpublished poems. In Mohan's prizewinning poem, a veteran's dead comrades won't stay buried in his mind, estranging him from the living world.
SOMETIMES THE DEAD
by Babo Kamel
Winner of the 2011 Charlotte Newberger Prize for Poetry
Entries must be received by January 15
LILITH Magazine offers this free contest with a $150 prize for poems on Jewish and feminist themes. Kamel's elegy for her mother expands into a reflection on how the departed still seem to occupy space in our homes.
BON APPETIT
by Carol Milkuhn
Winner of the 2010 Literal Latte Food Verse Awards
Postmark Deadline: January 31
This well-regarded online journal offers $500 for "poems with food as an ingredient". In Milkuhn's witty poem, two female friends discuss romance over a luxurious meal, but the point where pleasure turns to selfishness is a matter of debate.
Fall 2011
WHAT THE GHOST KNOWS
by Jennifer Boyden
Winner of the 2010 Brittingham Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: September 30
The University of Wisconsin Press sponsors this long-running, prestigious $2,500 award for a full-length poetry manuscript. Boyden's The Mouths of Grazing Things was the 2010 winner. In this quirky philosophical poem, a hapless but well-meaning spirit tries some offbeat experiments to make sense of the living world, but is there any sense to be made?
IT IS BECAUSE I HAVE NO OTHER HIDING PLACE – PETRARCH 102
by Lynne Martin Bowman
Winner of the 2009 Jessie Bryce Niles Chapbook Competition
Postmark Deadline: September 30
This award of $1,000 for a poetry chapbook manuscript is offered by The Comstock Review in odd-numbered years only. The poems in Bowman's prizewinning collection, Water Never Sleeps, are each titled with lines from Petrarch. This elegiac selection contrasts an elderly relative's decline with the vibrant summer day outside the nursing home, as the narrator struggles to make a conversational connection between them.
WHEN PANDORA OPENED HER BOX SHE FOUND and other poems
by Danielle Cadena Deulen
Winner of the 2011 Miller Williams Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: October 31
The University of Arkansas Press offers this $5,000 award for a full-length poetry manuscript. In these selections from Deulen's prizewinning book Lovely Asunder, girls' intuitions of the divine make them wiser, despite their fragility, than the boys and gods who try to control the official story.
THE MONOTONOUS SUBLIME and FAIRY QUEEN
by Jo Sarzotti
Winner of the 2011 Bakeless Literary Prize in Poetry
Postmark Deadline: November 1
The notable Bread Loaf Writers' Conference offers this first-book prize in the genres of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Winners receive conference tuition and a publishing contract with Graywolf Press. Sarzotti's Mother Desert won the 2011 contest (2010 deadline). These bold, physical poems investigate humanity's appetite for destruction and the mythologies we build around it.
PSALTERY AND SERPENTINES and PALE RE-CREATION
by Cecilia Martinez-Gil
Winner of the 2009 Gival Press Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: December 15
This open poetry manuscript prize offers $1,000 and publication by Gival Press, a small press in Virginia that is interested in work with a social or philosophical message, including gay/lesbian issues. In these sensual, dreamy selections from Martinez-Gil's winning collection Psaltery and Serpentines, the speaker experiences words and music not only with her eyes and ears, but as full-body immersive delights.
BIRD UNDER THE LAMPPOST
by Clara Fannjiang
Winner of the 2011 Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Award
Postmark Deadline: December 22 (don't enter before October 1)
Part of the Poetry Society of America's prestigious annual award series, this contest offers $250 for an unpublished poem by a US high school student. Elegant and meditative as a brushstroke painting, this lyric poem searches out infinity in small things.
Summer 2011
HOOKER AVENUE SERENADE
by Joshua Harmon
Winner of the 2010 Akron Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: June 15
This competitive award for a poetry manuscript offers $1,500 and publication by the University of Akron Press. This poem from Harmon's prizewinning Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie reveals an inner-city streetscape seen through a multiplicity of portals, from security cameras to mailbox slots to the blurry window of memory.
THE EDUCATION OF A POET
by Leslie Monsour
Winner of the 2010 Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Competition
Postmark Deadline: June 30
This long-running award offers $1,000 for a poetry chapbook manuscript, plus publication for the winner and up to 15 runners-up. Finishing Line is an independent press that welcomes emerging writers. Monsour's The House Sitter won the 2010 award. In this pithy, humorous poem, she speaks for all writers who have wondered about the usefulness of their peculiar calling.
ARCHED ANGELS
by Adam Chambers
Winner of the 2010 Literal Latte Poetry Awards
Postmark Deadline: July 15
This well-regarded online journal based in New York City offers prizes up to $1,000 for unpublished poems. In this melancholy, sensual poem, the narrator identifies with the fragility and humble earthiness of mushrooms as he offers his devotion to an absent lover.
HOW TO BECOME A DYKE, STEP THREE, BIRDS
by Nickole Brown
Winner of the Fall 2010 Orlando Prize for Poetry
Entries must be received by July 31
The feminist writers' organization A Room of Her Own Foundation offers this twice-yearly $1,000 prize for work that celebrates "liberation from the restraints of time and gender". Birds weave bright flashes of hope through Brown's winning poem, representing the life force that beckons the narrator to love again despite past losses.
Spring 2011
WHEN I THINK OF THE END OF THE WORLD NOW
by James Crews
Winner of the 2010 Prairie Schooner Book Prize Series in Poetry
Postmark Deadline: March 15
Prairie Schooner, the prestigious literary journal of the University of Nebraska, offers annual prizes of $3,000 and publication for full-length poetry collections and short story collections. Crews' The Book of What Stays won the 2010 poetry prize. In this elegiac yet hopeful lyric, he expresses faith that the simple vitality of the earth will survive our destructive civilization.
ONE STONE, THREE BIRDS:
by Daniel Khalastchi
Winner of the 2009 Tupelo Press/Crazyhorse Award for a First or Second Book of Poetry
Postmark Deadline: April 15
The prize is $3,000 in this competitive poetry manuscript prize for authors with no more than one published book, cosponsored by a leading independent press and the prestigious literary journal Crazyhorse. Online entry and payment accepted. In this hypnotic, sinister poem from Khalastchi's Manoleria, the cool euphemisms of marketing and business news are recombined into a scene that turns beastly.
AFFECTION
by Iain Haley Pollock
Winner of the 2010 Cave Canem Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: April 30
This high-profile contest for first books of poetry from African-American authors includes $1,000 and publication by University of Pittsburgh Press. In this poem from Pollock's prizewinning collection Spit Back a Boy, the speaker recalls monthly haircuts from his father as a tender, wordless bonding that his young self may not have fully appreciated.
LAYOVER AT THE AIRPORT IN DETROIT
by Mira Rosenthal
Winner of the 2010 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: May 1
This highly prestigious and competitive first-book contest offers $2,500 and publication by Kent State University Press. Rosenthal's The Local World won the 2010 award. Watching a youth shadowboxing with himself in the airport lounge, the speaker of this poem is moved to wide-ranging reflections on fragility, confinement, and obsession.
