Genre: Poetry

Poets who like beer, we have just the contest for you! Submissions are currently open for the fifteenth annual Dogfish Head Poetry Prize. A prize of $500, publication by Broadkill River Press, ten author copies, and two cases of Dogfish Head Craft Brewed Ales are given annually for a poetry collection written by a poet living in the mid-Atlantic states. Destiny Birdsong, Christopher Salerno, and Michael Dwayne Smith will judge.

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Poets currently living in Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, or Washington, D.C. may submit a manuscript of 48 to 78 pages by August 15. There is no entry fee.

The winner will be expected to attend a reading and award ceremony at the Dogfish Head Brewery in Lewes, Delaware, in December; lodging at the Dogfish Inn will be provided. Visit the website for complete guidelines.

“Generally I think that when you’re talking about the music of a country, you’re talking more or less about the soundtrack of a country, the soundtrack by which people’s lives are lived,” poet Tyehimba Jess said in a recent interview with the New School’s Wynne Kontos. “What’s interesting to me is to hear about the lives of the people who have created that soundtrack.” Jess’s Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, Olio (Wave Books, 2016), covers an array of nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American musicians and performers, presenting a multiplicity of voices and histories through a collage of verse, song, and narrative. What musicians are part of the soundtrack of your life? Choose several musicians or bands integral to your soundtrack, and write poems that reflect on the lives of these musicians, combining research and imagination in a song of your own.

The Academy of American Poets has launched the Ambroggio Prize, an annual award given for an unpublished poetry manuscript originally written in Spanish and translated into English by the poet or a translator. The winner will receive $1,000 and publication by Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe at Arizona State University.

The prize will be open for submissions from September 15 through February 15, 2018.  Poet Alberto Ríos will judge. Ríos is the state poet laureate of Arizona and had published several poetry collections, most recently A Small Story About the Sky (Copper Canyon Press, 2015).

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“We are happy to be working with the Academy of American Poets, which has been honoring artistic excellence in poetry for many decades, on this new prize to celebrate poets in the United States writing in Spanish as an important part of our rich American poetic tradition,” says Luis Alberto Ambroggio, the sponsor of the prize. Jennifer Benka, executive director of the Academy of American Poets, agrees. “We are thrilled to expand our prizes to include one that recognizes the important place the Spanish language has in American culture,” she says.

The prize is the first of its kind in the United States to honor American poets whose first language is Spanish. Spanish is the second most spoken language in the United States, with the 2013 U.S. Census estimating that approximately 38.4 million people—or 13 percent of the population—speak Spanish at home.

The Academy of American Poets administers several other prizes, including the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award, the $25,000 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the $5,000 Walt Whitman Prize, and the $5,000 James Laughlin Award. Cosponsor Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe publishes literary works, scholarship, and art books by or about U.S. Hispanics.