Photo © Brett Hall Jones
The Editors of Tupelo Quarterly are over-the-moon to announce that Brenda Hillman will judge the TQ7 Poetry Prize; the deadline for submissions is May 1, 2015.
Ms. Hillman’s most recent collection from Wesleyan University Press, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013), received the International Griffin Poetry Prize, as well as the Northern California Book Award for Poetry and the California Book Award Gold Medal in Poetry. In a piece for The Huffington Post, Dean Rader wrote, “Seasonal Works With Letters On Fire is a profoundly humane work. In language that moves from the chatty to the experimental to the heightened to the rhetorical, Hillman shows us once again that poetry is itself a tireless worker, always on our behalf.” Her previous eight collections, also with Wesleyan, include Cascadia (2001), Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005) and Practical Water (2009), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award.
Included in their list of “50 of the Most Inspiring Authors in the World,” Poets & Writers states, “[Hillman] reminds us that the language we use when ordering a sandwich is also the language we use to make art. Her environmental concerns prove writers can offer more than just aesthetic pleasure.” Among the awards Hillman has received are the 2012 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the 2005 William Carlos Williams Prize for poetry, and Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Hillman is the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California, where she teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs.
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To be considered for the Poetry Prize, send up to 5 unpublished poems of any style or sensibility. The author of the winning poem will receive $500 and publication in TQ7. Two runners-up will receive $250 each. Finalists will also be named and published. All poems submitted to the contest will be considered for publication either in TQ7 or later issues of Tupelo Quarterly.
Simultaneous submissions are welcome as long as you notify us immediately if any poems are accepted elsewhere. The Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize is open to anyone writing in the English language, whether living in the United States or abroad. Translations are not eligible for this contest. Poets submitting work for consideration may be published authors or writers without prior book or journal publications. Employees of Tupelo Press are not eligible. If Brenda Hillman is your current or former teacher, or if there is any reason at all that your integrity or ours could be called into question should you win the contest, please do not submit.
A contest entry fee of $20 (U.S.) must accompany each submission. Multiple submissions are accepted, as long as each submission is accompanied by a separate $20 contest entry fee. All submissions must be received by May 1, 2015.
Thank you for your participation and your support of Tupelo Quarterly.