In honor of the physician and poet William Carlos Williams, an eponymous competition is underway to celebrate a poem by a student attending a school of osteopathy or medical studies in the United States or Canada. The contest, now in its twenty-eighth year, awards a three-hundred-dollar prize sponsored by the Behavioral and Community Health Sciences Department of the Northeastern Ohio Universities Colleges of Medicine and Pharmacy (NEOUCOM).
A second-place prize of two hundred dollars and a third-place prize of one hundred dollars will also be given, and the three winners will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to read their poems at NEOUCOM on April 23, 2010. In addition, the editors of Journal of Medical Humanities will consider the winning works for publication.
The final judge will be psychiatrist and poet Richard M. Berlin, who received the 2002 Pearl Poetry Prize for his collection How JFK Killed My Father (Pearl Editions, 2003). English faculty of the Northeastern Ohio Universities consortium will act as preliminary judges.
December 31 is the deadline for writers pursuing an M.D. or D.O. degree to submit up to three poems of no more than 750 words each (enclose five copies of each poem). There is no fee to enter. Complete details can be found on the prize guidelines document online.