“Some prisons taste like / salt, copper, sludge / when you bite and crunch down / to the marrow...” In this video, Cortney Lamar Charleston reads Jevon Jackson’s poem “All of Us, In Prison” at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery for a 2019 Brooklyn Book Festival event. Jackson’s poem won PEN America’s First Prize in Poetry in the 2019 Prison Writing Contest.
Find details about every creative writing competition—including poetry contests, short story competitions, essay contests, awards for novels, grants for translators, and more—that we’ve published in the Grants & Awards section of Poets & Writers Magazine during the past year. We carefully review the practices and policies of each contest before including it in the Writing Contests database, the most trusted resource for legitimate writing contests available anywhere.