THE COMSTOCK REVIEW ANNUAL POETRY CONTEST
The Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award
ANNUAL POETRY CONTEST 2009
Final Judge: Maxine Kumin
(See information below)
Initial Screening by Editors
First Prize - $1 ,000
2nd Prize -$250; 3rd Prize - $100;
Honorable Mentions - Subscriptions
DEADLINE: Postmark by July 1, 2009
Here’s how it works- Our Editorial staff chooses approximately fifty-sixty Finalists. The highest scoring Finalists (25 or so) are considered Special Merit Poems. Special Merit Poems go to the Judge. The Judge determines the top three Prize Winners, The entire editorial staff then selects the honorable mentions from the remaining Special Merits.
The Rules:
1. Each poem on a separate 8.5 by 11 page, typed.
2. Poems must be original, unpublished in ANY Medium,print or electronic,
and not under consideration elsewhere.
3. No poem must exceed 40 lines, beginning with the first line of text
below the title. DO NOT count blank lines. Please also consider
our 65 character line width when submitting.
4. Name and ALL contact information on the REVERSE side
of EACH poem entered. If not included, we have to disqualify your entry.
5. Send SASE for results only. No Poems will be returned.
6. All Prize Winners, Honorable Mentions, and Special Merit Poems
are considered accepted work, and will be published in Issue 23.2
(Fall/Winter 2009). Finalists will be queried for permission to use their work.
A non-response is considered a yes. All accepted authors will receive
one contributor’s copy of the issue.
7. An entry fee of $5 per poem is required for each poem submitted. No limit
on the number of poems at $5 each.
Special offer for 2009: Order a one-year subscription with your entry
at the discounted price of $16 (normally priced $20). If outside the US,
add $5 per copy for postage. Make check out to "The Comstock Review."
Send contest submissions, after April 1, 2009 to:
CWG Poetry Contest 2009
P.O. Box 368
East Syracuse, NY 13057-0368
Also click here for Contest Guidelines which offer many further explanations of the rules and editor preferences.
*Red section above highlighted since we often receive poems that fall outside the rules and they will be disqualified unless we can reach the poets and have them resubmitted following the rules. The Editors
Judge for 2009: Maxine Kumin
Maxine Kumin (from poets.org/ was born in Philadelphia in 1925. She has published eleven books of poetry, including Connecting the Dots (W. W. Norton, 1996); Looking for Luck (1992), which received the Poets' Prize; Nurture (1989); The Long Approach (1986); Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief: New and Selected Poems (1982); House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate (1975); and Up Country: Poems of New England (1972), for which she received the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of a memoir, Inside the Halo and Beyond: The Anatomy of a Recovery (W. W. Norton, 2000); four novels; a collection of short stories; more than twenty children's books; and four books of essays, most recently Always Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry (Copper Canyon, 2000) and Women, Animals, and Vegetables (1994). She has received the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern Poetry, an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Sarah Joseph Hale Award, the Levinson Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize from Poetry, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, and the National Council on the Arts. She has served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress and Poet Laureate of New Hampshire, and is a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. She lives in New Hampshire.
See also: nortonpoets.com/ (From their site: In 1995, Kumin became a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets but resigned that post four years later, along with Carolyn Kizer, in protest over the board's reluctance to admit poets of color. This act led to an entire restructing of the institution's bylaws.)
Judge for 2008: Marie Howe
Marie Howe has a long-awaited new book out in 2008: The Kingdom of Ordinary Times. Stanley Kunitz describes her poetry as " luminous, intense, and eloquent, rooted in an abundant inner life.” Her previous books include The Good Thief (which was chosen for the 1987 National Poetry Series) and What the Living Do (1998). She has also co-edited In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Agni, Harvard Review and New England Review, among many others. Marie Howe received a Guggenheim and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She teaches at The Michener Center for Writers at The University of Texas in Austin, at Sarah Lawrence and NYU.
PREVIOUS JUDGES:
2007: Carolyn Forche
Carolyn Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1950. She studied at Michigan State University and earned an MFA from Bowling Green State University. Forché is the author of four books of poetry: Blue Hour (HarperCollins, 2004); The Angel of History (1994), which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award; The Country Between Us (1982), which received the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets; and Gathering the Tribes (1976), which was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Stanley Kunitz. She is also the editor of Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993). Among her translations are Mahmoud Darwish's Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems with Munir Akash (2003), Claribel Alegria's Flowers from the Volcano (1983), and Robert Desnos's Selected Poetry (with William Kulik, 1991). Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1992, she received the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum. Carolyn Forché teaches in the MFA Program at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. (Information from the Academy of American Poets.) For Further information: Modern American Poetry A recent poem from the New Yorker is available by clicking on the title of the magazine.
2006, THOMAS LUX
(Courtesy of the Academy of American Poets.)
For further information and sample poems visit: http://www.poemhunter.com/thomas-lux/poet-8306/
Thomas Lux was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1946. He was educated at Emerson College and The University of Iowa. His books of poetry include The Cradle Place (Houghton Mifflin, 2004); The Street of Clocks (2001); New and Selected Poems, 1975-1995 (1997), which was a finalist for the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Blind Swimmer: Selected Early Poems, 1970-1975 (1996); Split Horizon (1994), for which he received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Pecked to Death by Swans (1993); A Boat in the Forest (1992); The Drowned River: New Poems (1990); Half Promised Land (1986); Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy (1983); Massachusetts (1981); Like a Wide Anvil from the Moon the Light (1980); Sunday (1979); Madrigal on the Way Home (1977); The Glassblower's Breath (1976); Memory's Handgrenade (1972); and The Land Sighted (1970). Thomas Lux also has edited The Sanity of Earth and Grass (1994, with Jane Cooper and Sylvia Winner) and has translated Versions of Campana (1977).
Lux has been the poet in residence at Emerson College (1972-1975), and a member of the Writing Faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. He has also taught at the Universities of Iowa, Michigan, and California at Irvine, among others. He has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry and has received three National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
2005, CORNELIUS EADY
Cornelius Eady is the author of six collections of poetry, most
recently "Brutal Imagination" (Putnam, 2001), which was a finalist
for the National Book Award. His other collections include "Victims
of the Latest Dance Craze," "The Gathering of My Name," and "You
Don't Miss Your Water." Eady's many awards and honors include
fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim
Foundation, and the Lila Wallace-Readers' Digest Foundation. With
Toi Derricote, he is co-founder of Cave Canem, a summer
workshop/retreat for African American writers. In December 2002, a
production of "Brutal Imagination" opened at the Vineyard Theater, and
was awarded the 2002 Oppy Award from Newsday for the best first play
by an American playwright. Eady is currently co-chair of the MFA
Creative Writing Program at American University.
For further information and sample poems including audio, visit: http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v2n1/poetry/eady_c/
http://www.pshares.org/Authors/authorDetails.cfm?prmAuthorID=432
http://www.chelseaforum.com/speakers/Eady.htm
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