Pratt senior Portlyn Houghton-Harjo and Dartmouth senior Tom Bosworth win the 100th annual Glascock poetry contest

BY JESSE HAUSKNECHT-BROWN ’25 MANAGING EDITOR OF LAYOUT & FEATURES EDITOR

Content warning: This article mentions anti-Black violence.

Over the last 100 years, the Mount Holyoke College English department has invited college-aged poets and professional poet judges to the College to participate in the Glascock poetry contest. This year the judges — poets Hoa Ngyuen, Eileen Myles and Evie Shockley — split the prize and awarded it to Dartmouth College senior Tom Bosworth and Pratt Institute senior Portlyn Houghton-Harjo. The contest is named after Kathryn Irene Glascock, a student of the Mount Holyoke class of 1922, who died shortly after graduating. Glascock had been a promising poet and the editor-in-chief of the Mount Holyoke News; her parents gave a donation to the English department as a memorial to their daughter. The chair of the English department at the time, Ada Snell, used this to create the Glascock poetry contest. The following year, in 1924, Snell invited contestants from other colleges, making this year’s Glascock contest the 99th intercollegiate event.

Former judges include Robert Frost, Adrienne Rich, William Carlos Williams and Audre Lorde. Sylvia Plath, James Merrill, Anthony Hecht and Robert Lowell all competed in the contest as students.

The first event of the weekend was a conversation with the judges on the morning of Friday, March 31. Lucas de Lima, a poet and visiting lecturer in the English department, mediated a conversation with the judges and opened the discussion for audience questions near the end of the hour. The event took place in the Stimson Room in the Williston Memorial Library which had been rearranged so that there were rows of chairs facing the front, where the judges sat.

This year’s contestants — Bosworth, Houghton-Harjo, Mount Holyoke College’s Ace Chandler FP ’26, University of Massachusetts Boston junior Elizabeth Roa Martinez, Suffolk University senior Mason Newbury and Amherst College junior Jordan Trice — were seated in the front row.

“I liked how open the dialogue was and the mindfulness of the judges,” Olive Xia ’26 said about the judge’s conversation. “Their answers were all very well thought out and very nuanced. I loved how Eileen Myles answered the questions about poetic voice and gender.”