Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest deadline extended to May 15



2012 Off Channel

Submissions for the 40^th annual Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest will be accepted through May 15, 2013. This year’s judges are Laura Madelyn Wiseman for the Regional Contest and Lisa Zimmerman for the National Contest.

 

Special Upper Mississippi River Valley theme category judged by former QC Poet Laureate, Dick Stahl.  Visit MWC MVPC for submission guidelines.

Midwest Writing Center invites submissions to the 39th annual Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest

The Midwest Writing Center invites submissions to the 39^th annual Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest. Submissions will be accepted through March 31. Prizes will be given in two categories: National (all U.S. poets eligible) and Regional (only poets residing in the northern Mississippi Valley Region that includes the states of Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri and Wisconsin.)

Entry fees include $10 for up to three poems; $2 for each additional poem. To submit to both national and regional contests, entry fee is $15 for up to three poems in each contest category, $2 for each additional poem. Submissions are required to be submitted electronically at http://www.midwestwritingcenter.org/submissions/

Judges for the competition include Chad Parmenter, regional judge, and Nate Pritts, national judge.

Chad Parmenter received his Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri. His poems appear in numerous venues, including Best American Poetry, Harvard Review and Black Warrior Review. His chapbook, Bat & Man: A Sonnet Comic Book, is available from Finishing Line Press. Parmenter is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Luther College in Iowa.

Nate Pritts is the author of five books of poetry. His latest book, Sweet Nothing, is described by Publishers Weekly as “baroque and irreverent, banal and romantic.” POETRY Magazine called his third book, The Wonderfull Yeare, “rich, vivid, intimate, and somewhat troubled.” His work has appeared in many journals, including Gulf Coast, Boston Review and Rain Taxi. He is the founding and principal editor of H_NGM_N, an online journal and small press.

The Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest began in 1972 and has become a premier contest in the U.S. It is funded by donations, grants, and entry fees, the contest operates through the Midwest Writing Center, a non-profit parent organization, and volunteer poets, writers, and artists.

"The Sinks" now available at the MWC!

The Sinks by Ryan Walsh is now available for purchase at the Midwest Writing Center. The Sinks was the winning entry in the 2010 Mississippi Valley Poetry Chapbook Contest.

Ryan Walsh grew up in Elkins, West Virginia. He graduated from Warren Wilson College and holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His poems have appeared in Ecotone, FIELD, Green Mountains Review, Narrative Magazine, Southern Poetry Review, among others, and he serves on the editorial board of Q Ave Press, makers of handmade poetry chapbooks. Each spring, he teaches in the University of Michigan's New England Literature Program in Maine.

Reviews for The Sinks:
 "A prayer for transformation for recognition that even humans, those creatures of 'marbled meat / and water,' are part of the land: we are crops, 'lithe, bright grasses." - Jennifer Perrine

"In language rich and sinewy, with a terse energy and an evocative music, Ryan Walsh establishes his mastery as a poet of place. Like Richard Hugo, James Wright, Philip Levine, or Seamus Heaney before him, he embraces a love of the elemental, of earth and weather and landscape, of rural people and working-class life. Always accessible, bristling with sensual clarity, his poems nevertheless retain a sense of mystery and enigma that teases the reader into thought. As a line from Walsh's wonderfully celebratory poem "In the Frame of Innings, Pendleton County, W. Va." suggests, "What else to do but tip my hat / and marvel?"  - Ronald Wallace

"For Ryan Walsh, a pursuit of the Divine isn't possible without investigating the hard truths of landscape and the limitations of the body. Line by line, the music in The Sinks is arresting. The beauty here is boiled down to an essential and distinctly American voice. These poems hover in space between the pastoral and elegy. As if in a wind stripped field, the reader is invited to stand shoulder to shoulder with these speakers, searching for a vocabulary to ground the  grandeur of a Midwestern horizon."  - Amaud Jamaul Johnson