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.
