Award-Winning Poems 2016
Winter 2016-17
LATE BLOSSOMS
by Linwood D. Rumney
Winner of the 2015 Gival Press Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: December 15
This long-running contest from a LGBTQ-friendly press awards $1,000 and publication. In this hard-edged pastoral from Rumney's prizewinning debut collection, Abandoned Earth, humans' neglect of an old orchard contrasts with the animals' desperation for food in winter.
STRIPPED
by Mark Maire
Winner of the 2015 Codhill Press Poetry Award
Entries must be received by December 20
This open poetry manuscript prize offers $1,000, 25 copies, and distribution by SUNY Press. In this brief, unsettling poem from Maire's prizewinning first book, Meridian, the indecisive season between summer and fall gives the first hint of more dangerous times ahead.
BEAR WITNESS
by Tiana Clark
Winner of the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition
Entries must be received by January 5
This poetry chapbook prize includes $250, publication by Bull City Press, and a free workshop and one-week residency at the Frost Place, a poetry and arts center at Robert Frost's historic homestead in New Hampshire. Clark's Equilibrium was the most recent winner. This poem, inspired by a photo series by artist Carrie Mae Weems, voices an African-American woman's search for a liberating self-image.
MOTHER'S DAY and other poems
by Lauren Clark
Winner of the 2016 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry
Entries must be received between January 1-February 28
The Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) sponsors this prestigious open poetry manuscript prize, which includes $5,500 and publication by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Clark's Music for a Wedding was the most recent winner. This suite of poems, first published in Entropy magazine, takes a shovel to our sentimental tableaux of marriage, to dig for what is raw, real, and complicated.
FILM SCHOOL and other poems
by Peter Mishler
Winner of the 2016 Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry
Entries must be received between January 1-February 15
Sarabande Books offers this well-regarded open poetry manuscript prize of $2,000 and publication. Mishler's collection Fludde was the most recent winner. This philosophical suite of poems from the journal Sixfold notices the multiple perspectives at work in every moment: the field of external reality that "cries...to let itself be known", the remembered child-self, the present speaker, and the one who will replay and revise these memories later, to name just a few. "I am alone,/ so there are three of us."
Fall 2016
SO WILL THERE BE APPLES? and other poems
by Lucy Ingrams
Winner of the 2015 Manchester Writing Competition
Entries must be received by September 23
This contest from Manchester Metropolitan University is the UK's largest cash prize for unpublished poetry and short fiction, with top awards of 10,000 pounds in each genre. Ingrams' winning portfolio can be found on pages 27-31 of the prizewinners' booklet linked here. In these romantic poems, her breathless lines, rich with nature imagery, are reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins. She chases the fleeting moment when an encounter with beauty leaves us "stunned out of role, no longer lusting after somewhere else to be."
THE POLAR BEAR
by Jennifer Givhan
Winner of the 2015 Lascaux Prize in Poetry
Entries must be received by September 30
Online journal The Lascaux Review gives this $1,000 award for individual poems, with anthology publication for the top 12. Previously published work accepted. First published in Rattle, this timely poem depicts a mother's anguish about protecting her black son from man-made dangers, both those he can see and those he is too young to understand.
TO SALT LAKE, LETTER REGARDING GENEALOGY and BELLUM
by Rio Cortez
Winner of the 2015 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize
Entries must be received by September 30
Established in 2015 to mark the 20th anniversary of Cave Canem, a literary organization supporting black poets, this $500 award gives publication by Jai-Alai Books, a writer's residency in Miami, and a featured reading at the O, Miami Poetry Festival. Black writers at any stage of their career may submit a chapbook manuscript. Cortez's winning book was I have learned to define a field as a space between mountains. In these incisive poems first published in The Offing, she writes her "bloodline" back into the history of the American frontier.
A WOMAN FROM THE INFANT MORTALITY REVIEW BOARD CALLS
by Amanda Newell
Winner of the 2015 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: October 1
Carlow University in Pittsburgh sponsors this $1,000 prize for an unpublished poem by a US woman over 40 with no published full-length books in any genre. The winner also receives an expenses-paid trip to read at the university with contest judge Allison Hedge Coke. Newell's fierce, heart-wrenching poem shows a bereaved mother fighting for control of the narrative of her loss.
BEDTIME STORIES and others
by Sarah Sansolo
Winner of the Summer 2016 Sixfold Short Story and Poetry Awards
Entries must be received by October 24
This online journal gives quarterly prizes of $1,000 apiece to the short story and group of poems that win the most reader votes. Besides the modest entry fee, entrants are obligated to read, comment, and vote on 18 randomly assigned entries in their genre. Sansolo's ironic confessional poems are linked by themes of erotic desire and the myths that mask it.
Summer 2016
GLASSMAKING
by Katherine Sánchez Espano
Winner of the 2014 Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: June 15
This venerable literary journal gives $1,000 and publication for a full-length poetry collection. Espano's prizewinning collection was The Sky's Dustbin. This lyrical poem suggests that children mature by learning to see beauty in the unfamiliar and difficult.
POEM IN WHICH I PLAY THE RUNAWAY
by Rochelle Hurt
Winner of the 2015 Barrow Street Press Book Contest
Entries must be received by June 30
This prestigious press with an interest in avant-garde work awards $1,000 and publication for a full-length poetry manuscript. The title poem from Hurt's prizewinning book dissects the recklessness of a young woman's desire.
SAVING FOR SLEEP
by Hannah Craig
Winner of the 2015 New Measure Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by June 30
Sponsored by Parlor Press and the literary journal Free Verse, this contest gives $1,000 and publication for a full-length poetry collection. Craig's This History That Just Happened was the most recent winner. This dream-like poem blends imagery of an erotic encounter, a storm at sea, and a fisherman hauling in his (perhaps willing) prey.
DESTRUCTION DERBY and ON REFINEMENT
by Zayne Turner
Winner of the 2015 Kore Press First Book Award for Poetry
Entries must be received by July 15
This well-regarded feminist press gives $1,500 and publication for a poetry manuscript by a woman with no prior published full-length collections. Turner's Body Burden was the most recent winner. This pair of poems is a study in contrasts, finding a symphony of sound and light in a demolition derby, and violent chemical processes beneath the surface of a parlor scene—"yellowcake" as both tea-time delicacy and radioactive material.
[SOMETIMES I DON'T KNOW IF I'M HAVING A FEELING]
by Matthew Siegel
Winner of the 2015 Felix Pollak Prize
Postmark Deadline: September 15 (don't enter before July 15)
This long-running contest from the University of Wisconsin Press gives two awards of $1,000 and publication, the Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes, for an unpublished full-length poetry manuscript. Siegel's prizewinning collection was Blood Work. This chatty, angsty poem moves from obsessive self-analysis to an intuition of an unnameable presence.
Spring 2016
from BOOK OF HOURS
by Kevin Young
Winner of the 2015 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: May 15
The Academy of American Poets awards this prestigious $25,000 prize for the best book of poetry published in the US during the previous calendar year. In this excerpt from the title poem of Young's winning collection, long-drawn-out sentences in short lines convey how the passage of time feels to impatient or grief-heavy human beings, compared with the patient wisdom of mountains and weather.
POLICE REPORT
by Dave Nielsen
Winner of the 2015 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry
Entries must be received by May 15
Lynx House Press awards $2,000 and publication for a poetry collection by a US author, which includes foreign nationals living and writing in the US and US citizens living abroad. Nielsen's Unfinished Figures won the most recent contest. This timely poem envisions adult authority confounded by a child's sacred, risky innocence.
PLEDGE
by Elizabeth Astrid Powell
Winner of the 2015 Robert Dana–Anhinga Prize for Poetry
Entries must be received by May 20
This long-running contest gives $2,000 and publication by Anhinga Press for a poetry manuscript. Powell's collection Willy Loman's Reckless Daughter won the most recent award. In this poem from her first book, The Republic of Self, she playfully imagines the Pledge of Allegiance as a wedding vow, to depict a child's way of bringing peculiar adult ideas down to a personal level.
KADDISH (FOR LUCIEN STRYK)
by Susan Azar Porterfield
Winner of the 2015 Cider Press Review Editors' Prize Book Award
Postmark Deadline: June 30 (don't enter before April 1)
This award from a well-regarded literary journal gives $1,000 and publication for a poetry manuscript. Porterfield's Dirt, Root, Silk won the most recent contest. A Kaddish is a Jewish prayer of praise for God, traditionally recited to honor the dead. In this poem, the speaker communes with her friend's memory by being fully present to observe a bird on a branch, entering a reality where no one is separate.
