Winning Writers Awards Jude Nutter and Marilyn Taylor $1,500 Each for Outstanding Poetry

Winning Writers is pleased to announce the results from its thirteenth annual Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Jude Nutter of St. Paul, Minnesota won the Tom Howard Prize of $1,500 for a poem in any style or genre, for "The Shipping Forecast". Marilyn L. Taylor of Madison, Wisconsin won the Margaret Reid Prize of $1,500 for a poem that rhymes or has a traditional style, for "The Seven Very Liberal Arts: A Crown of Sonnets". 2,435 entries were received from around the world.

Quiet waves of emotion propel Nutter's elegy for her mother, launched by childhood reminiscences of listening to the BBC Radio broadcast of weather forecasts for the seas around the British Isles. Contest judge Ellaraine Lockie said, "In exquisitely delivered subtle conceits, a dying woman travels from one state to another as if on a boat to the next life, her deathbed a berth on a cargo ship."

Taylor's witty sonnet sequence is a flirtatious survey of the seven disciplines that comprised medieval higher education. Lockie said, "There are innumerable examples of sex cleverly hiding in the curtains of literature, but here the poet does a massive spring cleaning while managing to keep the form itself immaculate and to polish by parody each of the classic liberal arts métiers of old."

Thirteen Honorable Mentions of $100 each went to Donald Adamson, David Hill, Justin Hunt, Laura M. Kaminski, Ray Keifetz, Eileen P. Kennedy, Allegra Keys, Kathleen McClung, Katy McKinney, Maribeth Pittman, Shoshauna Shy, Stuart J. Silverman, and Jeff Walt. The winning entries and judge's remarks are published online.

About the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest

The Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest accepts original poems of any length. Both published and unpublished works are accepted. $4,000 in prizes will be awarded, including $1,500 for a poem in any style and $1,500 for a poem that rhymes or has a traditional style. The judges define traditional poetry as the verse forms commonly in use by major poets in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, as well as traditional Asian forms such as haiku. Entries are accepted both online and by mail. The deadline is September 30, 2016. For guidelines, please see winningwriters.com/tompoetry

This year Winning Writers bids a fond farewell to retiring contest judge Ellaraine Lockie and welcomes its new final judge Soma Mei Sheng Frazier. Frazier's debut fiction collection, Collateral Damage: A Triptych, won the 2013 RopeWalk Press Editor's Fiction Chapbook Prize, and has earned praise from Nikki Giovanni, Daniel Handler (a/k/a Lemony Snicket), Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Antonya Nelson, Molly Giles and others. You can find her work online at Eclectica Magazine, Carve Magazine, Eleven Eleven, and Kore Press. Frazier's second fiction chapbook, Salve, was published in March 2016 by Nomadic Press, and new work is forthcoming in Glimmer Train and ZYZZYVA. She is Chair and Assistant Professor, English and the Humanities, at Cogswell Polytechnical College, and Founding Editor of Cog: a multimedia publication. She has also taught at the Sarah Lawrence College Summer High School Writers Program, Holy Names University, Gavilan College, Oakland School for the Arts, and Valhalla Women's Correctional Facility, and worked at KQED, the Bay Area's public media source.

About the Contest Sponsor

Winning Writers was founded in 2001 to provide expert literary contest information and resources to the public. In addition to the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest, it sponsors the Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest, the North Street Book Prize for self-published books, and the Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest. Winning Writers is one of the "101 Best Websites for Writers" (Writer's Digest, 2015) and one of the "100 Best Websites for Writers" (The Write Life, 2016). Learn more at WinningWriters.com and join our 64,000+ Twitter followers at @winningwriters.