Congratulations to Wendy Miles for winning first place in the 2012 Best Poetry Contest. Her poem, “Egg,” was chosen from 349 poems submitted by 105 authors. To read the winning poetry, please visit the Richmond Magazine website.
Finalists
- Allison Seay, “Secret Room”
- Darren Morris, “Theory on the Occurrence of Cicadas”
Honorable Mentions
- Polly Lazaron, “Aligning with Birth Stars”
- Joanna S. Lee, “incongruent”
- Wendy Miles, “The Green Place”
- John L. Morgan IV, “The Barn House”
- Shann Palmer, “Bad Girls”
Judging Process 2012
The head judge was Joshua Poteat, recent recipient of the Theresa Pollak Prize for Excellence in the Arts. A.M. Marshall, Allison Titus and Christina Trimarco assisted the judge in reading the entries.
The two-part process implemented to choose the winning poems was highly unscientific: (1) Find the good ones, and (2) Be generous and open when doing so. This seemed like the best way to proceed through over 300 poems. Luckily, the contest readers knew good writing when they saw it. They’d read widely, across many sub-genres — from experimental/avant garde to straight ol’ narrative, from neo-formalist works to prose poems.
Back to Best Poetry index page