Award-Winning Poems 2013
Winter 2013-14
GOLDFISH FOR EXAMPLE IN PROXIMITY
by Endi Bogue Hartigan
Winner of the 2012 Omnidawn Open Poetry Book Contest
Postmark Deadline: December 31
Omnidawn, a publisher of innovative contemporary poetry and fiction, gives this $3,000 prize for a full-length poetry manuscript. Hartigan's Pool [5 choruses] won the most recent contest. This poem repeatedly juxtaposes the concepts of goldfish and gang shootings, such that we start to see the criminals as delicate trapped creatures and the fish as frightening symbols of alienation, and then the other way around, again.
WRESTLEMANIA III and others
by Chris Joyner
Winner of the Fall 2013 Sixfold Poetry Contest
Entries must be received by January 24
Sixfold is an online journal with twice-yearly prizes up to $1,000 apiece for the short fiction and poetry that win the most votes from the other entrants. Joyner's prizewinning poems explore the question "What makes a man?" through the profane sacraments of wrestling, mosh pits, and girlie magazines.
Fall 2013
MY FATHER COMES HOME FROM WORK
by Barbara Brinson Curiel
Winner of the 2012 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry
Postmark Deadline: September 30
This open manuscript contest with a $2,000 prize is co-sponsored by California State University Fresno and Anhinga Press. Curiel's Mexican Jenny and Other Poems was the most recent winner. In this simple yet weighty narrative of an immigrant family, well-chosen mundane details tell us everything about the contrast between the young father's grueling factory job and the idealized American lives he watches on television.
NORTH SIXTH
by Leslie Shinn
Winner of the 2013 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize
Postmark Deadline: October 31
This first-book prize for a US woman poet awards $1,000 and publication by Persea Books. Shinn's Inside Spiders won the 2013 contest (2012 deadline). This poem looks at a ghetto street with one unblinking eye on its devastation and the other eye searching out moments of grace.
A HORSE GRAZES IN MY SHADOW
by Matt Rasmussen
Winner of the 2012 Walt Whitman Award
Postmark Deadline: November 15
The Academy of American Poets sponsors this prestigious first-book award, with a $5,000 prize and publication by Louisiana State University Press. Rasmussen's Black Aperture won the 2012 contest (2011 deadline). This poem of mourning nods to James Wright's famous poem "A Blessing" with an encounter that is less gentle but perhaps equally charged with holy meaning.
THE STICK SOLDIERS
by Hugh Martin
Winner of the 2012 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: November 30
This competitive first-book prize gives $1,500 and publication by BOA Editions. In the title poem from his winning collection, Martin, a young veteran of the Iraq War, contrasts the Christmas cards the soldiers received from American children and the Iraqi children's anti-war graffiti.
Summer 2013
ADYNATA (AN ELEGY) and other poems
by Sarah Crossland
Winner of the 2012 Boston Review Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: June 3
This $1,500 prize for a suite of poems includes publication in a cutting-edge journal of literature and progressive culture. Crossland's winning poems use folktale imagery and dream-like shifts of logic to lead our adult minds back into an earlier realm of expanded possibilities. "Casting" looks back with regret at the moment when a child's imaginative play gives way to self-conscious silence. In "Be Very Afraid", another poem in the group, a 14-year old girl grows a doorknob on her spine, as a metaphor for the adolescent's discovery of her body as a thing that others will try to open, fix, or change.
RED ROVER
by Catherine Staples
Winner of the 2011 Guy Owen Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: June 15
This $1,000 award is sponsored by Southern Poetry Review, a fine journal that favors rich, imagistic work. Staples' lyric poem envisions St. Augustine's famous conversion story as a return to childhood's direct, intuitive awareness of the spiritual realm.
PORTRAIT OF MY PARENTS MAKING LOVE AS A STOMACH VIRUS
by Lauren Schmidt
Winner of the 2012 Bellevue Literary Review Prize for Poetry
Entries must be received by July 1
This journal published by New York University awards prizes up to $1,000 for poetry, fiction, and essays on themes of health, healing, illness, the mind, and the body. Schmidt's earthy, surprising poem shows her parents' bodies in two very different contexts, yet with the same wholehearted embrace of the other person in all their physical imperfection and need.
ELEGY WITH HER RED-TIPPED FINGERS
by Tarfia Faizullah
Winner of the 2012 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry - First Book Award
Postmark Deadline: July 6
This prestigious contest for US authors gives a $2,000 award, plus $1,500 for a reading at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and publication by SIU Press. Faizullah's Seam won the 2012 prize. The speaker of this vivid poem anticipates returning home to Bangladesh for a beloved grandmother's funeral, while contemplating her tenuous connection to the culture they shared.
BIRDING BY EAR
by Susan Cohen
Winner of the 2012 Literal Latte Poetry Awards
Postmark Deadline: July 15
This long-running online journal based in New York City gives prizes up to $1,000 for unpublished poems. This wry poem explores aging, privilege, and the ways we classify one another.
Spring 2013
RASPA
by Orlando Ricardo Menes
Winner of the 2012 Prairie Schooner Book Prize Series
Postmark Deadline: March 15
This prestigious award series gives $3,000 and publication by the University of Nebraska Press for poetry and short fiction collections. Menes won the poetry category with his third collection, Fetish. In this powerful poem, a Cuban immigrant boy's mother worries that his taste for humble ethnic foods will betray their multiracial origins in a country where whiteness is the key to success.
YA NO PUEDE and other poems
by Mike Schneider
Winner of the 2012 Florida Review Editors' Awards
Postmark Deadline: March 17
The Florida Review, the literary journal of the University of Central Florida, gives prizes of $1,000 apiece for poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction. Three of Schneider's poems won the 2012 poetry category (not available online). The group of poems linked here, published in the online journal White Gardenia Poetry Press, were inspired by his travels in war-torn Nicaragua in 1984.
WAITING
by Allison Benis White
Winner of the 2011 Four Way Books Levis Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: March 31
Open to all authors, regardless of publication history, this $1,000 poetry manuscript prize accepts entries in odd-numbered years only, alternating with the Intro Series Prize for first books. Benis's Small Porcelain Head won the most recent award. This prose-poem meditation on connection and disconnection spirals gracefully in and out of its recurring themes, like the ripples on a pond.
LATE SEPTEMBER
by Angela Hume
Winner of the 2012 Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest
Postmark Deadline: April 22
Omnidawn, a publisher of of innovative poetry and literary fiction, sponsors this poetry chapbook manuscript contest with a prize of $1,000, publication, and 100 copies. Hume's The Middle won the 2012 prize. The silences in this spare, emotionally charged poem invite the reader to fill in the back-story of an encounter that could be read as either traumatic or transcendent.
