Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters (GLCL), in cooperation with The Michigan Poet, is thrilled to announce our 2014 Poetry Contest with final judge Thomas Lynch. Submissions to the contest will be accepted online from January 1, 2014 – February 28, 2014. The winning poem, in addition to being celebrated at a special reading with Thomas Lynch in Grand Rapids on Saturday, April 12th during National Poetry Month, will be published on GLCL’s website and distributed as a special broadside by The Michigan Poet; the winning poet will also receive a cash award of $100.00.

 

Thomas Lynch is the author of five collections of poems and four books of essays. A “Classic Contemporary” edition of Skating with Heather Grace, his first book of poems, has just been re-issued by Carnegie-Mellon University Press. In 2011, Paraclete Press published The Sin Eater: A Breviary, a collection of Lynch’s sin-eater poems accompanied by black and white photographs by Michael Lynch with cover art by Sean Lynch; an Irish edition was also published in 2012. Lynch has taught with the Department of Mortuary Science at Wayne State University in Detroit, the graduate program in writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta. He is a charter member of the faculty of the Bear River Writers Conference at Walloon Lake in Michigan. Lynch’s essays, poems, and stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Granta, The New York Times, Times of London, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review and elsewhere. He lives in Milford, Michigan, where he has been the funeral director since 1974, and in Moveen, Co. Clare, Ireland, where he keeps an ancestral cottage.

 

The Michigan Poet was started in 2009 with the printing of poetry broadsides and ultra-small micro-books. While continuing to publish broadsides and poetry on the web, The Michigan Poet now also offers email newsletters, book reviews, and author events. Inquiries can be directed to TheMichiganPoet@gmail.com, or visit The Michigan Poet’s website at www.themichiganpoet.com.

 

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

1). Submissions must be original, unpublished works of poetry. There is no minimum or maximum word count.

 

2). Submissions will be accepted ONLINE ONLY from January 1 – February 28, 2014. Poems are unable to be modified after submission. You may submit your poem(s) here.  

 

3). The entry fee per submission is $5.00. In addition to granting entry into the writing contest with the chance to have your poem read by Thomas Lynch, your $5.00 fee also helps both GLCL and The Michigan Poet do good work within the literary community. There is no limit to the number of entries a poet may submit, but please note that each entry requires a separate $5.00 fee.

 

4). We DO accept simultaneous submissions, but we request that the writer notify us immediately if their poem is accepted for publication or receives an award elsewhere.

 

5). Please DO NOT put your name or other identifying information on the poem; this contest is judged in blind fashion. You may include your name and contact information on your cover letter, however.

 

6). The winner will be publicly announced at a special poetry reading and contest celebration in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with Thomas Lynch on Saturday, April 12, 2014 at 7:00pm. The winning poem will be published on GLCL’s website and will be produced as a special edition broadside by The Michigan Poet for distribution. The winner will also receive a $100 cash prize.

 

7). You do not need to live in or be from the Great Lakes region to enter. Our contest is national/international in scope. We’re happy to find new authors that might welcome a small cash prize, publication online by one of the region’s literary nonprofits, and a broadside of their work that will be distributed widely by The Michigan Poet.

 

8). Questions? Contact GLCL at info@readwritelive.org.