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Poetry Contest 2021 Winners

June 13, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Sweet is pleased to announce the winning poem of the 2021 Poetry Contest, along with two runners up and eight finalist poems.

Judge Laura Donnelly selected the poem “Before school there are icicles” by Meghan Sterling from a field of eleven finalist poems chosen by Sweet Lit poetry editors. Donnelly also singled out “Prey Drive” by Anna Chotlos and “Just the Daily Turn” by Cathlin Noonan as runners up. You may read the judge’s comments on these three poems in the special poetry contest issue of Sweet Lit, which will go up some time this summer. All finalists will be offered publication in the special poetry contest issue of Sweet Lit.

FINALISTS:

“With Any Luck” by Angela Just

“If The Wound Is How the Light Enters You, How Do You Heal?” by Anna Chotlos

“Post-Menopausal Love Poem That Begins with Guilt and Ends with Air Plants” by Jen Karetnick

“The Customs of Grief” by Karen Craigo

“I Wanted My Mother to Say to Me as She Lay Dying” by Natalie Marino

“Bound to Repeat It” by Connie Post

“That’s Right It Starts with an Earthquake” by Michele Parker Randall

“A Walk After Being Let Go” by Meghan Sterling

Poetry Contest

February 1, 2021 / / 0 Comments
Poetry Contest Ad

Our annual poetry contest is now in February! Nothing says “love” more than poetry, so we think this is the perfect month. Send us your poems about love, falling in love, saying goodbye to love, or nothing about love at all! Submission fee is $10 and you can submit up to 5 poems for each entry. But don’t delay, there are only 28 days in this month to get your best poems to us. The winner will receive $500 and all finalists will be published in a special contest edition of Sweet Lit.

For more information, visit our Submittable page.

We encourage and welcome submissions from diverse voices and under-represented
populations, including, but not limited to, people of color, members of the LGBTQ+
community, those with disabilities, and the elderly.

CLMP’s community of independent literary publishers believes that ethical
contests serve our shared goal: to connect writers and readers by publishing
exceptional writing. We believe that intent to act ethically, clarity of guidelines, and
transparency of process form the foundation of an ethical contest. To that end, we
agree to:

1) conduct our contests as ethically as possible and to address any unethical
behavior on the part of our readers, judges, or editors;

2) to provide clear and specific contest guidelines—defining conflict of interest for
all parties involved; and

3) to make the mechanics of our selection process available to the public. This
Code recognizes that different contest models produce different results, but that
each model can be run ethically. We have adopted this Code to reinforce our
integrity and dedication as a publishing community and to ensure that our contests
contribute to a vibrant literary heritage.

Sweet Lit Poetry Contest 2020 Results

August 14, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Thanks so much to all the wonderful poets who entered our contest this year! It was a very strong group, and both the editors and the judge remarked on how difficult it was to make final decisions.

WINNER:

KT Herr, “Improv”

KT Herr (she/her) is a queer poet, songwriter, and curious person with work published or forthcoming in Dream Pop, Small Orange, Frontier, Quarter After Eight, and others. KT earned her MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, where she was the 2019-20 Thomas Lux Scholar and co-director of the 2020 Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival. KT was awarded a 2019 Pabst Fellowship from the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and was a semifinalist in the 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest. Her ghost ship is currently anchored in Oak Bluffs, MA, where she teaches poetry workshops and interns for Black Lawrence Press.

RUNNERS UP:

Amy Miller, “Meteor, April 2020” and “Baby”

Leila Sinclaire, “What I Mean”

FINALISTS:

Marcia Alrich, “The Dahlia”

Shevaun Brannigan, “The Men”

Rebekah Miron, “Bird Heart”

Dayna Patterson, “Pied Beauty Redux”

V.S. Ramstack, “a crow living with regret”

Sherre Vernon, “A Descriptive Linguistics of Isolation”

JUDGE: Paige Lewis is the author of Space Struck (Sarabande Books, 2019). Their poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Best New Poets 2017, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. Paige currently lives and teaches in Indiana.

PROCESS: Poetry editors at Sweet Lit narrowed down the submissions to 10 finalist poems, which the judge received stripped of identifying information. The winning poem and some of the finalists will be published in Sweet Lit in the September 2020 and future issues.

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