The Endangered Wildlife Trust runs a nature reserve—the Pacuare Nature Reserve—in Costa Rica, dedicated to the conservation of wildlife including Leatherback turtles and Agami herons. It is now sponsoring a Wildlife Poetry Competition. The firstPRIZE is one week’s board and lodging at La Casa Grande, in the heart of the Pacuare Nature Reserve. The sponsors want to name the winner the poet laureate of the reserve as they aim to establish a long-term relationship between eco-activism / conservation and eco-poetics and poetry. The deadline for submissions is June 15, 2015.

Description: The Endangered Wildlife Trust sponsors of the 2015 Wildlife Poetry Competition are looking for poems of up to 100 lines on the subject of wildlife or the boundaries between the human and the natural. The theme will be interpreted broadly. There is a submission fee of £10 for one poem (and £5 for each additional poem.)

Length: Up to 100 lines.

numberof poems: Up to 5 poems.

Format: Please put your name, age and telephone number inTHE EMAIL and attach your poem/s as a word document. DO NOT write your name in the document that contains the poem.

First prize: One week’s board and lodge at La Casa Grande in the Pacuare Nature Reserve. travel not included – though we are currently working on sponsorship). Worth $840. TheWINNER is elected Poet Laureate of the Pacuare Reserve for one year. They will have the chance to run a poetry workshop with local children on our EnvironmentalEDUCATION PROGRAM. All the poems they write at or about the reserve will be published on our website.

Runners up: 3 runners up will have their poems published on our website. They will also receive a picture postcard,CERTIFICATE, and turtle-tag key-ring with a handmade purse.

Judges:

Vahni Capildeo: British Trinidadian writer Vahni Capildeo is the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry 2014 at theUNIVERSITY of Cambridge. Her books includes No traveller Returns (Salt, 2003), Undraining Sea (2009), Dark & Unaccustomed Words (2012) and Utter (2013), inspired by her time as a lexicographer at the Oxford English Dictionary. Her poetry will be featured in New Poetries VI (Carcanet, 2015). Measures of Expatriation, prose sequences on place and identity, is forthcoming from Carcanet in 2016. A former Rhodes Scholar, Capildeo has worked on Old Norse and translation theory, as well as questions related to postcolonial literature. She has acted as a judge for a number of prizes, including the Forward prizes for Poetry, She is currently finishing a new sequence, Simple Complex Shapes, and collaborating with Jeremy Hardingham on performances focusing on sacrifice, noise, silence, renewal and joy. 

Joseph Minden: Joseph Minden is a poet and guitarist. He recently completed a project called The Polar Musecommissioning poems for the Polar Museum, Cambridge. He is currently working on a project to write, comission and orchestrate poetry/music collaborative pieces about climate change. He has published poems in the PN Review, The Junket, Iota, and Magma and in 2013 was the winner of the John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan Poetry prize.

Kat Addis: Kat Addis is a poet and the Strategic Planning Coordinator for The Endangered Wildlife Trust. She is passionate about both conservation and poetry and is writing The Song of The Turtle a ballad about the life of a Leatherback Turtle which will be illustrated.

Send submissions to kat@pacuarereserve.org with the subject line “poetry submission”.

All proceeds go direct to the maintenance of the Reserve and the EnvironmentalEDUCATION PROGRAM.

Click here to pay and write the payment confirmation number in your email.

for more information see http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fund/pacuarepoetrycompetition