POETRY CONTEST

The Palm Springs Writers Guild Poetry Contest is open to all members beginning January 15, 2019. The contest judge is Deborah Landau, PhD, Acclaimed Poet, Director of Creative Writing, New York University

A contest entry consist of 3 poems, each entry fee is $25. 

Pay your entry fee online here.

Cash prizes for 1st place $300, 2nd place $200, 3rd place $100.  With all winners’ permissions, poetry will be posted on PSWG website following contest. 1st and 2nd place winners will read their poems at the Guild’s April General Meeting.

Poetry Contest Rules

• Contest entries limited to one page per poem.
  
• Thirty lines of poetry including white spaces.
  
• Limit of 1 entry (3 poems) per contest.
  
• Poetry may be on any subject, any style, any poetic format.
  
• Required font is 12 point Times New Roman.
  
• All entries must be in Microsoft Word format.
• Poet’s name should NOT be on the document.
• Please title each of your 3 poems.
• Each entry of up to 3 poems should be placed in one MS Word document.  Use poet’s name in subject line of email.  Example:  Sylvia Path poetry entry.  Email to PSWGcontest@gmail.com. 
  

Example of Subject line of email:
Subject: PSWG Poetry Contest. YOUR NAME HERE
Example of body of email content:
Attached please find my entry to the PSWG Poetry Contest titled, “Title Here.”
Signed, Your Name

• No entries accepted after February 15, 2019.
  
• Submit your poem to pswgcontest@gmail.com - and you can also e-mail us there if you have any questions.

About our contest judge

Deborah Landau, PhD, Acclaimed Poet, Director of Creative Writing, New York University

Powerful and vulnerable, spare in form and ardent in tone, her lyric sequences broach existential questions as sweeping and timeless as her language is particular and contemporary. —Publishers Weekly
Her poems leap from the page with uncanny mortal energy. —The Rumpus

Deborah Landau is the author of three collections of poetry: The Uses of the Body and The Last Usable Hour, both Lannan Literary Selections from Copper Canyon Press, and Orchidelirium, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her other awards include a Jacob K Javits Fellowship from the US Department of Education and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

The Uses of the Body was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, and included on the Best of 2015 lists by The New Yorker, Vogue, BuzzFeed, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. A Library Journal starred review described the book “As freshly immediate as ever,” as Landau “reveals that ‘the uses of the body are manifold,’ moving in four sections with a roughly chronological feel from wedding parties to flabby bodies around the pool to the realization ‘But we already did everything’—all with an underlying sense of urgency: ‘Life please explain.’ As Landau explores her physical self and her sexuality, she’s tart, witty, fluid, direct, and brutally honest.” A Spanish edition is forthcoming from Valparaiso Ediciones.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, Poetry, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, selected for The Best American Poetry, and included in anthologies such as Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation, Not for Mothers Only, The Best American Erotic Poems, and Women’s Work: Modern Poets Writing in English.

Her new book, Soft Targets, will be published in April 2019.

Landau was educated at Stanford University, Columbia University, and Brown University, where she was a Javits Fellow and received a Ph.D. in English and American Literature. She teaches in and directs the Creative Writing Program at New York University, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, sons, and daughter.