Award-Winning Poems 2018
Winter 2018-2019
IT'S TRUE. THERE ARE PLACES WE'D RATHER BE and other poems
by Monica Berlin
Winner of the 2018 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition
Entries must be received by December 3
This high-profile award series from Southern Illinois University Carbondale gives two prizes of $2,500 and publication for a manuscript by a US poet. Berlin's Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live was the most recent winner. In this selection of poems, first published in the Museum of Americana: A Literary Review, travel vignettes reveal the difficulty of staying present in the here and now, the elusive space between disappearing memories and the anticipated future.
101, TAIPEI
by Nicholas Wong
Winner of the 2018 Peter Porter Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by December 3
This single-poem prize from Australian Book Review gives awards up to A$5,000 (approximately $3,900) and publication. No simultaneous submissions. This stream-of-consciousness poem inspired by a Chinese pop song conveys the dizzying experience of a 21st-century media culture where everything is hyper-intensified and nothing is quite real.
JAMES BROWN and other poems
by Joann Gardner
Co-winner of the 2018 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship
Postmark Deadline: December 22
This prestigious poetry institution offers four annual awards of $1,000 plus a $1,000 teaching honorarium for chapbook manuscripts by US authors with no published books. Two of these awards are for authors under 30. Gardner's The Deaf Island was co-winner of the all-ages category. These poems make familiar experiences fresh and vivid through close observation, from the raw energy of a rock concert to the sound of the sea outside an insomniac's bedroom window.
ORRERY
by Eric Smith
Winner of the 2018 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry
Postmark Deadline: December 31
This open manuscript contest from a well-regarded literary journal gives $2,000 and publication. Smith's Black Hole Factory was the most recent winner. This sad and luminous poem re-creates the feeling of watching the space shuttle explode on television, our domesticated entertainment suddenly revealing our vulnerability in the unscripted and unbounded universe.
OPHELIA DREAMS OF SEA URCHINS
by Gillian Cummings
Winner of the 2018 Colorado Prize for Poetry
Postmark Deadline: January 14
This long-running award for a poetry manuscript gives $2,000 and publication by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University. In this seductively melancholy poem from Cummings' prizewinning The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter, Hamlet's suicidal paramour finds peace in an underwater world.
Fall 2018
THE SEMELE SEQUENCE
by Emily Viggiano Saland
Winner of the 2017 Coniston Prize
Entries must be received by September 1
Radar Poetry awards this $1,000 prize with online publication for a group of poems by a woman. This sequence investigates how intimacy ruptures bodies and souls, through the Greek myth of Semele, mother of the god Dionysus, who was incinerated when she asked to see her lover Zeus face-to-face.
THE MAGIC TRICK
by Nicholas Friedman
Winner of the 2018 New Criterion Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: September 30
This long-running prize from a prestigious journal of arts and culture gives $3,000 and publication for a poetry manuscript that pays close attention to form. The New Criterion is known for its traditionalist aesthetic and politics. Friedman's manuscript Petty Theft won the 2017-deadline contest. This wry poem describes a street performer perfectly balanced on the line between grift and charming illusion.
FLORIDA MAN WRITES A LETTER TO HIS SISTER IN 2010
by Ephraim Scott Sommers
Winner of the 2016 Patricia Bibby First Book Award
Postmark Deadline: November 1
The literary small press Tebot Bach gives this award of $500 and publication. Sommers' prizewinning collection was The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire. In this affecting poem, a man circles round the unspeakable news of school shootings and other disasters, trying to hold them in his mind alongside the life-affirming ordinary pleasures of nature and family life.
I-797C NOTICE OF ACTION and other poems
by Jan-Henry Gray
Winner of the 2017 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: November 30
This competitive award from BOA Editions gives $1,000 and publication for a first book of poetry. Gray's Documents won the 17th annual award. This selection of poems pushes back against the intrusive, impersonal nature of citizenship applications, and offers emotional vignettes about the Filipino immigrant experience.
STEALING CLAY FROM THE CRAYOLA FACTORY
by Grant Clauser
Winner of the 2016 Cider Press Review Editors' Prize
Postmark Deadline: November 30
This established literary journal gives a $1,000 award and publication for a first or second book-length poetry collection. There is also a $1,500 Book Award with the same rules and deadline, for authors at any stage of their career. This poem from Clauser's prizewinning Reckless Constellations depicts youths in a factory town whose pranks express their barely-understood needs for beauty and opportunity.
Summer 2018
AGRICULTURAL FAIR and other poems
by Tina Barr
Winner of the 2017 Barrow Street Book Prize
Entries must be received by June 30
This prestigious, long-running contest gives $1,500 and publication by Barrow Street Press. In this selection from Barr's prizewinning collection Green Target, the poems turn on a sudden shift of attention from bucolic images of plants and animals to the inner strife and fragility of the people watching them, a context that can never be fully escaped.
CACHE
by Josh Booton
Winner of the 2016 New Measure Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by June 30
This open poetry manuscript prize gives $1,000 and publication in Parlor Press's poetry series, Free Verse Editions. Booton's winning collection, The Miraculous Courageous, is a sequence of 60 short monologues taking the reader inside the mind of an autistic boy. This wistful, sensual poem from Raleigh Review explores how our memories of simple joys are shadowed by an impossible longing for perfection.
MANCHESTER
by Nicole Melanson
Winner of the 2017 Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Awards (adult category)
Postmark Deadline: July 1
This annual award gives web publication and prizes up to $1,000 in adult and $200 in youth categories, for poems that "explore and illuminate positive visions of peace and the human spirit." With unique, powerful imagery, Melanson's poem depicts parents' primal love and fear for their children in a world where terrorists can strike at any time. The title refers to the 2017 suicide bombing during a concert at Manchester Arena where many teenagers were present.
THE END OF MYTHOLOGY
by John Sibley Williams
Winner of the 2017 Literal Latté Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: July 15
This long-running award for unpublished poems gives prizes up to $1,000 and publication in a well-regarded online journal. Williams' winning poem speaks in the collective voice of boys becoming men, whose knowledge of agriculture and weather does not prepare them for the winds of political and economic change.
COLD STREAM
by Heidi Morrell
Winner of the 2016 Ex Ophidia Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by August 31
Founded in 2014 by author and handpress-printer Richard-Gabriel Rummonds, this small literary press gives $1,000 and publication for a full-length poetry manuscript. Morrell's Old as Rainfall: Nature and People was the inaugural winner. This sparely worded poem from Young Ravens Literary Review is a philosophical meditation on human consciousness as only a small part of the natural world.
Spring 2018
THE NOTEBOOK
by Donald Levering
Winner of the 2017 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry
Postmark Deadline: March 15
This long-running, competitive $1,000 prize for unpublished poems is sponsored by a foundation preserving the legacy of American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962). In Levering's tribute to the prison writings of Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti, a Hungarian Jewish poet killed in the Holocaust, the details that are left out are as important as what is included.
UNDERNEATH THERE IS A WOUND
by Natalie J. Graham
Winner of the 2016 Cave Canem Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by March 16
Cave Canem's prestigious awards for African-American poets include this first-book prize with $1,000 and publication by Graywolf Press. In this incisive poem from Graham's winning collection Begin with a Failed Body, she contrasts her son's wholesome compassion for dead creatures with a writer's professional consumption and dissemination of trauma stories that are not his to tell.
STILL LIFE WITH IVORY
by Brad Aaron Modlin
Winner of the 2015 Cowles Poetry Book Prize
Entries must be received by April 1
Southeast Missouri State University Press offers this open poetry book prize of $2,000 and publication. Modlin's Everyone at This Party Has Two Names was the 2015 winner. In this remorseful litany, a deceased uncle's tall tales stand in for all the questions that children don't think to ask their elders until it's too late. Read more excerpts on his website.
THE SECRET OF WHITE
by Nancy Hewitt
Winner of the 2016 Spoon River Poetry Review Editors' Prize
Postmark Deadline: April 15
This long-running contest with prizes up to $1,000 is judged by prominent poets and includes a reading in Bloomington, IL. Inspired by a Pierre Bonnard painting, Hewitt's poem invites us to interrogate vision itself—the multiple layers of technique, emotion, and narrative that make up our response to the physical act of seeing a color.
PSYCHE INCITES A RIOT
by Bradford Tice
Winner of the 2014 Trio Award for a First or Second Book
Entries must be received by April 30
Trio House Press gives two annual prizes of $1,000 and publication for poetry collections: the Trio Award for a First or Second Book, and the Louise Bogan Award for a book of poems contributing in an innovative and distinct way to American poetry. In this taut poem from Tice's prizewinning second collection, What the Night Numbered, the myth of Psyche pulling off Cupid's veil is recast as a queer uprising akin to Stonewall.
