2012 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize

First Prize: $1,000. Chapbook publication by Hill-Stead Museum, 15 free copies and a 20-minute introductory reading preceding the evening's featured poet in the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, summer 2012.

Second Prize: $350. Brief introductory reading in the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, summer 2012.

Competition Judge: Tony Hoagland, poet, National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, and professor at the University of Houston.

Deadline: Entries must be postmarked between July 15 and October 15, 2011. Winners to be announced January 1, 2012.

Reading fee: $30 payable by check to Hill-Stead Museum, to benefit the 2012 Sunken Garden Poetry Festival.

Eligibility
• Previous winners of the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize are ineligible
• Poets featured in the Festival 1999–2011 are ineligible
• Translations and previously published or self-published books are ineligible
• Previously published poems with proper acknowledgment are acceptable.

Guidelines:
• Submit 20–32 pages (no more than one poem per page) and $30 reading fee

• Manuscripts should be paginated consecutively, with a table of contents and acknowledgements page, and bound with a clip.

• Include two cover pages, one with title only, and a second with your name, address, telephone number(s), email address, and title of the manuscript. Your name must not appear elsewhere on the manuscript.

• Manuscripts are judged anonymously.

• No manuscripts will be returned.

• Simultaneous submissions to other publishers are permitted. Notify Hill-Stead by email at poetry@hillstead.org if manuscript is accepted elsewhere.

Mail manuscript and entry fee to:

Artistic Director, Sunken Garden Poetry Festival
Hill-Stead Museum
35 Mountain Road
Farmington, CT 06032

Hill-Stead Museum, a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation, adheres to the Contest Code of Ethics adopted by the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.

Download Guidelines (PDF)
See past winners

Sunken Garden Poetry Prize Winners 2004–2011

2011

First Place: Patricia Hale for Composition and Flight
"...a manuscript chock full of finely wrought poems, testaments to the evocative tension between control and wildness... These poems, from first to last, charmed me with their beautifully controlled use of language and line..." (Brad Davis, competition judge)

Second Place: David Watts for At High Altitude
"...beautiful, perplexing, strangely satisfying forays into intense compression... Discreet spaces where image, longing, and dizziness intersect to capture a reader's imagination." (Brad Davis, competition judge)

2010

First Place: Ginny Lowe Connors for Under the Porch
"...the poet's eye is sharp and true, and her sense of form beautifully honed, so the epiphanies of these poems are found both in their insight and their music." (Clare Rossini, competition judge)

Second Place: Kate Lebo for Sugarspill, Washington
"These poems crackle with energy. The imagination leaps from image to unexpected image with admirable spryness. The voice of the poet is intimate, with an attractive candor, and the music of the lines often mesmerizing." (Clare Rossini, competition judge)

2008/09

First Place: Don Thompson for Back Roads
"...absolutely stunning, unified... deeply sensitive, responsive to the natural world..." (Gray Jacobik, competition judge)

Second Place: Kim Roberts for Exhibitionist
"...beautifully crafted, with a strong range of approaches to form and fascinating materials." (Gray Jacobik, competition judge)

2006

First Place: Renée Ashley for The Museum of Lost Wings. "...tight, resonant, lyrical, edgy... marked by paradox and reversals of linguistic expectation." (Martha Collins, final judge)

Second Place: John Surowiecki for Bolivia Street
"...clarity, economy, transformative imagery and wit." (Martha Collins, final judge)

2005

First Place: Brad Davis for Short List of Wonders
“… a manuscript of consistent depth and quality…”
(Dick Allen, final judge)

2004

First Place: Suzanne Cleary for Blue Cloth
“Here are poems that attend equally to the tactile, ‘beautiful surfaces’ of the day to day and the ideas those surfaces cannot help but generate. I admire especially the intelligence that is everywhere apparent…” (Bob Cording, final judge)