Women Poets at Barnard Poetry Prize
Announcing the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize, given biennially for an exceptional second collection of poems.
Prize: $1,500 and publication by W.W. Norton & Co.
The contest is open to U.S. women poets who have already published one book of poetry. (The first collection should have been printed in an edition of 500 or more copies. Chapbooks do not qualify.) Although a writer may submit a manuscript that has been submitted to other contests, any manuscript under option or under contract to another publisher is not eligible.
Because the prize is given to a poet who has already published a first book, the manuscripts are not read anonymously. Every qualified manuscript will be read with care by the panel of judges and the chief judge, who changes every year.
Manuscript submissions will be accepted from August 1 to October 15, 2010. The winner will be announced in April 2011.
A qualified applicant should submit three copies of her book-length manuscript (at least 55 pages) with a cover letter naming the title and publisher of her first collection.
Entry fee: $20, payable in check to Women Poets at Barnard.
Women Poets at Barnard
Barnard College
3009 Broadway
New York, NY 10027For more about the history of the Prize or to order past publications, click here.
Winner, 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize
The 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize was awarded to Sandra Beasley for I Was the Jukebox, chosen by Joy Harjo.
Harjo writes of Beasley's work, "there is no wavering of image or sign. . . these poems are fresh, crisp and muscular...they are decisive and fearless." Harjo explains, "every object, icon or historical moment has a soul with a voice," and claims that, "in these poems these soulful ones elbow their way to the surface of the page, smartly into the contemporary now."
Beasley's first book, Theories of Falling, won the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize. Her recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Cave Wall, Blackbird, and Poetry. Honors for her work include the 2008 Poets & Writers Maureen Egen Exchange Award, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, and fellowships to the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Millay Colony, and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She serves on the Board of the Writer's Center and writes for the Washington Post Magazine in Washington, D.C. She is at work on Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life.
via barnard.edu