The Vernal Equinox arrives Sunday, March 20. To celebrate spring’s arrival last year, WIZ ran a Spring Poetry Runoff Contest and Celebration that had fantastic participation–a veritable cascade of sparkling poesy–and was lots of fun. So beginning March 20, we’re running WIZ’s Second Annual Spring Poetry Runoff Contest and Celebration!
In keeping with WIZ’s mission to help develop, inspire, and promote literary nature and science writing in the Mormon writing community, we encourage poets to help call an end to winter and sing up the season of flower and vegetable patches, returning flocks, and light that takes the tarnish off the blood.
Contest rules
- Submit poems to wilderness@motleyvision.org between March 14 and April 4.
- All poems submitted must be original, published or unpublished work. If the work has been previously published, please provide publication information and be sure you can grant us rights to re-publish the work.
- Please submit poems no longer than 50 lines.
- All poems submitted must be spring-themed or at least mention spring.
- Poets may submit up to 3 poems each.
- Winners of the previous year’s Most Popular Vote Award and Admin Award are not eligible for competition this year but may participate in the non-competition category of the celebration.
The contest will run from March 20 through April 8 or longer, if enough poems come in to warrant extending the contest. All submissions will be published on the blog, where they’ll become automatically eligible for competition as well as open to readers’ informal feedback in post comments. Authors retain all rights to their work. Authors: Please include a short bio, 50-100 words long, with your submissions. To help speed up scheduling and posting duties, no photos please.
Entries will be posted one per day until all entries have been posted. Following the contest’s closing, readers will vote on WIZ to choose the winning poem in the Most Popular Vote Award category. We will also offer an Admin Award to a second poet, to be determined by blog administrators.
Winners will be announced within a week after the last poem has been posted and all votes have been cast. The winner will be awarded his or her choice of Mark Bennion’s Psalm and Selah: A Poetic Journey Through The Book Of Mormon (Bentley Enterprises 2009), A Metaphorical God: Poems ( Persea 2008) by Kimberly Johnson, or The Clearing (Texas Tech University Press 2007) by Philip White.
If you would like to participate in the Spring Poetry Runoff but don’t wish to compete, let me know and I’ll mark the poem, €œNot for competition. €
So, if you have written a poem which mentions spring or one in which spring figures prominently and that fits WIZ’s themes and content, e-mail it to us at wilderness@motleyvision.org or pk.wizadmin@gmail.com. Please review our submissions guide before submitting.
Wilderness Interface Zone 