Annual poetry contest accepting submissions

Jameson Wolf Assistant Culture Editor

NC State Department of English’s annual spring poetry contest gives a voice to North Carolina’s poetic talent while searching for tomorrow’s poets.

Each year, the department receives hundreds of submissions to perform initial reads on before passing off the top 50 or so to a prominent poet acting as the year’s guest judge. The winning poem earns the poet the $500 Dorianne Laux Prize for Poetry.

Submissions for the 2023 contest with guest judge Khalisa Rae are open to North Carolina residents and NC State students through March 1.

Wilton Barnhardt, a professor in the Department of English and founder of the contest as it functions today, said the nature of a free-to-enter poetry contest open to all unpublished poets across a state encourages a massive variety in submissions.

“You always get the elementary school who decided, as a class, to send their rhyming poems, and you’ll get some poems that would be quite appropriate for a church bul- letin,” Barnhardt said.

Amidst this variety, however, there are undeniable gems from both practiced poets and people who do not consider themselves poets at all.

“If somebody at UNC-Wilmington wins the poetry prize, that is not a great surprise,” Barnhardt said. “But what is so wonderful is when it’s an older retired person in the mountains, who just has a few good poems and sends it in and beats everybody in the state. That’s a great joy.”

As a member of the MFA in Creative Writing faculty, Barnhardt likens the po- etry contest to football scouts attending high school games in search of talent, saying that often, winners go on to enroll in NC State’s MFA program.

“How else do you find the poets of tomorrow?” Barnhardt said. “It’s important [to] the craft, to the art, to move on.”