K.B. Ballentine
Donna Barkman
Jane Blanchard
Marta Rijn Finch
Lissa Kiernan
Jean L. Kreiling
Carol Levin
Sharon Fish Mooney
George H. Northrup
Uche Ogbuji
Muriel Harris Weinstein
Jackie K. White

Translation

Anna M. Evans
Robert Schechter

Featured Artist

Rick Mullin

Featured Musician

Janet Packer

First Prize:

“Doubt Springs” – Jean L. Kreiling

Second Place:

“Swans and the River” – Gladys Henderson

Third Place:

“Robert Davidson, Trapeze Artist” – Carol Levin

Honorable Mention:

“Her Father’s Ghost” – Katharyn Howd Machan

Look for these poems, along with other String Poet Prize finalists and fine poets in a forthcoming issue of String Poet. Don’t forget to Subscribe to the String Poet Newsletter and Like us on Facebook to get updates about the coming Award Ceremony in November 2013. We hope to see you there!

Take a tour of the art and culture of Italy, explored through poetry and music. String Poet Studio Series presents An Evening in Italy: Poetry and Music, with poetry by Annabelle Moseley and Carolyn Raphael, and musical performances by cellist Amy Camus and violinist Gabriel Schaff.

Annabelle Moseley is the author of The Divine Tour, (Finishing Line Press, 2012) a collection of poems about Italy, and the nationally best-selling full-length poetry collection, The Clock of The Long Now, published in 2012 by David Robert Books.  She is also the author of a YA novel: The Delaney: Journey to Banba. The first Walt Whitman Birthplace Writer-in-Residence, 2009-2010, Moseley lectures in poetry and religious studies at the undergraduate and graduate level.  A Pushcart Prize nominee, Moseley has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, The Lyric, Measure, Able Muse, and in Oprah.com’s O, The Oprah Magazine’s Selection of Original Poetry. She is the innovator of a new poetic form, the “mirror sonnet,” and is the winner of a 2008 Amy Award from Poets & Writers. A. M. Moseley lives with her husband on the North Shore of Long Island.

Carolyn Raphael retired from the English Department at Queensborough Community College, CUNY, after more than thirty years of teaching. Her poems have appeared in journals including The Lyric, Orbis, Measure, and Rattapallax, and on the Newington-Cropsey Cultural Studies website for the American Arts Quarterly, where her poem, “Honorable Mention,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poem, “Swept Away,” was published in String Poet.  A chapbook, Diagrams of Bittersweet, was published by Somers Rocks Press in 1997, and her poetry collection, The Most Beautiful Room in the World, was published by David Robert Books in February, 2010.  She is the poetry coordinator of Great Neck Plaza in Great Neck, New York, where she ran a poetry reading series. Guests included such luminaries as X.J.Kennedy, Rhina Espaillat, and Tom Disch.  Now she is working on a project called “Poetry in the Plaza,” which places  poems on local bulletin boards, much as “Poetry in Motion” placed poems on the subway. She also coordinates the annual Great Neck Plaza Poetry Contest.

Amy Camus, cellist, is an active performer in the New York area.  A founding member of the Cremona String Quartet, she toured the Northeast with the quartet for seventeen years, giving first modern-day performances of works by nineteenth-century American composers, as well as a number of world premieres by contemporary composers, and complete Bartók and Beethoven cycles. She has also been a member of the Long Island String Quartet since 2001. She currently performs as a member of  many of New York’s orchestras, including NY Gilbert and Sullivan Players, the Long Island Philharmonic, the Queens Symphony Orchestra (assistant principal cellist) and the New York Grand Opera. Ms. Camus is on the faculty of Nassau Community College, where she teaches cello and coaches chamber music. She is also an adjunct assistant professor at Queensborough Community College, the City University of New York, where she teaches courses in music history and opera.  An avid enthusiast of Baroque music, Ms. Camus also performs on the bass viola da gamba and baroque cello.

Gabriel Schaff is a free-lance violinist in the greater New York area and performs regularly as a tenured member with many of the leading symphony, opera, and ballet ensembles in the region, in addition to frequent chamber and recital collaborations. In recent seasons he has appeared with the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra on their North American tour, the American Symphony Orchestra, the Stamford Symphony, Long Island Philharmonic, Northeastern Pennsylvania Philharmonic, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Glimmerglass Opera Festival, and on Broadway in “The Producers” and “Wicked”, and in Paul Shaffer’s orchestra on “The Late Show” with David Letterman. He is the concertmaster of the SONOS Chamber Orchestra in New York City. His second CD of vocal chamber music with tenor Martin Dillon was released in 2004 on Ganymede Records, and he is currently working on a recording project which juxtaposes contemporary music for solo violin with Bach’s B minor Partita, as well as recent live performances with pianists Richard Alston and Thomas Carlo Bo, which explore unjustly neglected works of the grand Romantic tradition of the 19th century. He is the founder and Artistic Director of the Englewood Chamber Players, a non-profit organization which brings together some of the finest musicians in the New York area who perform music of the highest caliber for the communities in which they live, as well as traveling to those unable to attend traditional concerts.

Liz Ahl
Stuart Bartow
Michael Graber
Tim Kahl
Siham Karami
Jean L. Kreiling
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
Stephen S. Power
Elisavietta Ritchie
Jane Satterfield
Ellen Steinbaum

Translation

Ned Balbo
Tim Kahl
David Wayne Landrum

Featured Artist

Rosemary Starace

Featured Musician

Shem Guibbory

Submission Guidelines

Up to 40 lines, all forms accepted. No previously published poems, or poems that have won previous prizes.  Winner receives $200 and composition of original music by professional composer inspired by the winning poem, to be performed live at awards ceremony. Winner and Runners-up published in Spring 2013 issue of String Poet and invited to read at the Award Ceremony in May 2013; all contest submissions are considered for publication in journal.

Entry Fees: $10.00 for up to 3 poems, $15.00 for up to 5 poems, $20 up to 7.
Submissions deadline: February 25, 2013

Final Judge: George Held is a widely published fiction writer, satirist, translator, book reviewer, and a poet who has received seven Pushcart Prize nominations. He was a three-year Fulbright lecturer in Czechoslovakia and has served on the board of The South Fork Natural History Society since 1991. His fifteenth book is After Shakespeare: Selected Sonnets (Červená Barva Press, 2011). His most recently published book is Neighbors: The Yard Critters Too (Filsinger & Company, 2013), the second volume of animal poems for children, illustrated by Joung Un Kim.

Composer: Eleanor Cory‘s work has been recognized by awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Fromm Foundation of Harvard University, Aaron Copland Fund, Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, Morse Grant of Yale University, MacDowell Colony, and PSC-CUNY Research Foundation. She has received an American Composers Alliance Recording Award, the Miriam Gideon Award from the International Association of Women in Music, as well as prizes from the Hollybush, Kucyna, and Music of Changes International Competitions, and the Davenport, and New Jersey Guild of Composers Competitions. She has composed musical setting of poems by James Merrill, Marvin Bell, Robert Creeley, Rachel Hadas, Mark Strand, Octavio Paz, W.S. Merwin, David Ignatow, Muriel Rukeyser, and Wallace Stevens. Her poems have been published in Iambs and Trochees and Poetry Porch: Sonnet Scroll. She currently teaches Composition at Mannes College of Music.

Last year’s String Poet Prize was awarded to J. D. Smith for his poem, “Upkeep,” which was set to music by composer Barry Tognolini. Mr. Tognolini performanced his composition, “Tristezza,” following J. D. Smith’s reading of “Upkeep,” to a rapt audience.

Online Submissions

Submissions should be made, along with the entry fee, by 11:59 PM PST on February 25, 2013.
Payment: Use the shopping cart on this page to send payment by credit card or PayPal. Make sure you choose the correct amount based on the number of poems you are submitting. If your PayPal email address does not match the email used to send your poems, please make note of that in your contest submission email.
Submissions: After completing payment, send a single e-mail with your poem(s) to contest@stringpoet.com. Poems should be included in-line as text within the email body. Attachment formats accepted: PDF (.pdf), Rich Text (.rtf), Word (.doc), or plain text (.txt). Include your name and contact information in the body of the email, or as a separate cover page within the attachment.

Postal Submissions

Send your poem(s) and payment, postmarked on or before February 25^th, 2013 to:
String Poet Prize c/o Long Island Violin Shop
8 Elm Street
Huntington, NY 11743
Checks payable to “String Poet” drawn from a U.S. Bank.   Author’s name and contact information typed on the BACK of each submitted page. Include a SASE or your email address if you would like to be notified of contest results, or subscribe to String Poet. Hardcopy entries cannot be returned, and will be recycled.

Barbara Crooker‘s poems have appeared in magazines such as The Green Mountains Review, The Hollins Critic, The Christian Science Monitor, Smartish Pace, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Nimrod, The Denver Quarterly, The Tampa Review, Poetry International, The Christian Century, America, and others. She is the recipient of the 2007 Pen and Brush Poetry Prize, the 2006 Ekphrastic Poetry Award from Rosebud, the 2004 WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the 2004 Pennsylvania Center for the Book Poetry in Public Places Poster Competition, the 2003 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, the 2003 “April Is the Cruelest Month” Award from Poets & Writers, the 2000 New Millenium Writing’s Y2K competition, the 1997 Karamu Poetry Award, and others, including three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, fourteen residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; a residency at the Moulin a Nef, Auvillar, France; and a residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, Ireland. A twenty-nine time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and five time nominee for Best of the Net, she was a 1997 Grammy Awards Finalist for her part in the audio version of the popular anthology, Grow Old Along With Me–The Best is Yet to Be (Papier Mache Press). Her books are Radiance, which won the 2005 Word Press First Book competition and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize, Line Dance, which came out from Word Press in 2008 and won the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence, and More (C&R Press, 2010).

Internationally acclaimed Violinist Shem Guibbory, an award winning soloist and chamber musician, has made an indelible mark on the face of today’s new music industry as an extremely talented performer, a creative producer, and a successful entrepreneur. Hailed for his interpretations of 20th Century music, his recording of Violin Phase on the ECM label has become an American classic of avant-garde music.

For the past 15 years, Mr. Guibbory has been a member of the First Violin section of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and has appeared as soloist with the New York Philharmonic, the Beethoven Halle Orchestra, the Kansas City Symphony and the Symphony of the New World. He was the original violinist in the Steve Reich Ensemble and has performed recitals and chamber music throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe. He has also recorded five CDs with Anthony Davis, including Maps, a violin concerto commissioned by the Kansas City Symphony (Gramavision). He has premiered over 60 new compositions, of which 30 were written expressly for him.

Mr. Guibbory made his recital debut at New York City’s Alice Tully Hall in 1988. His recordings can be found on the ECM, Gramavision, Opus 1, DG, Albany, Bridge, MSR Classics and CRI labels. He has studied with Broadus Erle, Romuald Tecco, Evelyn Read and Sophie Feuermann.

This event was funded in part by Poets and Writers, Inc. with public funds from New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Saturday, September 22^nd at 5:00 PM

Hosted by Annabelle Moseley at The Long Island Violin Shop
8 Elm Street, Huntington, NY 11743

Daniel Brown is a product of Long Island, growing up in Westbury and attending W. Tresper Clark High School there. He studied music as both an undergraduate and a graduate student at Cornell University, and taught music history and theory at Cornell and Dartmouth College. His graduate work at Cornell involved a computerized analysis of music, and this eventually led to a change of field from music to information technology. Daniel obtained a position at IBM, and has pursued a career in a variety of positions including technician, salesperson, and manager. In parallel with this career, Daniel has been writing and publishing. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Partisan Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, The New Criterion and other journals. They have also won a Pushcart Prize, and have appeared in a number of anthologies including Poetry 180 (/edited by Billy Collins), Fathers (edited by David Ray), and The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (edited by David Yezzi). Daniel’s collection Taking the Occasion was awarded the New Critieron Poetry Prize. His Why Bach?, an online appreciation of Bach’s music, is available on the Internet. Daniel currently lives in Baldwin, NY.

David Yezzi’s books of poetry are The Hidden Model (TriQuarterly Books, 2003) and Azores (Swallow Press, 2008), a Slate magazine best book of the year. He is the editor of The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, foreword by J. D. McClatchy. His libretto for a chamber opera by David Conte, Firebird Motel, received its premiere in San Francisco in 2003 and was recently released on CD from Arsis. A Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University from 1998 to 2000, his poems and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Best American Poetry,The Yale Review, Poetry and elsewhere. A former director of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York, he is executive editor of The New Criterion. He is currently at work on a libretto of The Last Tycoon for composer Cyril Deaconoff and West Bay Opera.

Harris Becker has had a rich and varied career as a guitarist and lutenist. He has performed extensively both as a soloist and chamber musician throughout the United States, Europe, South America, Mexico and Canada. His interest in contemporary music has offered him the opportunity to premiere many new solo and ensemble pieces. Among the composers who have dedicated works to him are Carlo Domeniconi, Hayley Savage, Raoul Pleskow, Howard Rovics and the microtonal composer Johnny Reinhard. Most recently he premiered new works by Michael Frassetti, Richard Iacona and the“Harrisdale Concerto” by Alan Hirsh for violin/saw and guitar. Mr. Becker is director of guitar studies at LIU Post, is on the music faculty at Nassau Community College, and has been on the music faculties of the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College and Director of Music for Mixed Ensembles at the International Institute for Chamber Music at the Richard Strauss Conservatory in Munich. The Florida State Division of Cultural Affairs selected Mr. Becker to be part of Florida’s Artist Residency Program, giving lecture/performances on the lute and baroque guitar. In 2007 he received a faculty recognition award for outstanding service from the School of Visual and Performing Arts at Long Island University.

Saturday, August 25^th at 5:00 PM

Ned Balbo received the 2010 Donald Justice Prize, selected by A.E. Stallings, for The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems (Story Line Press/WCU Poetry Center). His previous books include Lives of the Sleepers (Ernest Sandeen Prize and ForeWord Book of the Year gold medal) and Galileo’s Banquet (Towson University Prize). He has received three Maryland Arts Council grants, the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Award, and the John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize. New poems are out or forthcoming in The Common, Iowa Review, River Styx, Sou’Wester, Avatar Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Baltimore with poet-essayist Jane Satterfield and her daughter Catherine.

Jane Satterfield is the author of Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond (Demeter, 2009) and two poetry collections: Assignation at Vanishing Point (Elixir Press Book Award) and Shepherdess with an Automatic (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, Towson University Prize). Among her awards are an N.E.A. Fellowship in poetry and the Faulkner Society Gold Medal in the Essay as well as residencies in poetry or nonfiction from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.  A new manuscript, Her Familiars, was a finalist for the 2011 National Poetry Series, and her poem, “The War Years,” was selected by Jo Shapcott as winner of the 2011 Mslexia Poetry Competition. Satterfield’s craft essay, “Lucifer Matches,” appears in Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010).

The Counterclockwise Ensemble is a guitar, strings and percussion quintet that plays contemporary American chamber music. Equally at home in a variety of genres, the group primarily plays the compositions of guitarist Rich Stein, sprinkling in pieces by Gustav Holst and Aaron Copland as well as traditional American and Irish folk tunes into their sets.

This event was funded in part by Poets and Writers, Inc. with public funds from New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Hosted by Annabelle Moseley, the event featured a concert by Composer and Featured Musician Barry Tognolini, a reading by 2012 Finalist Judge Kim Bridgford, and a reading of the Honorable Mention and Runner-Up poems, including Muriel Harris Weinstein and Maxine Silverman. Claire Nicolas White spoke about her late husband, Robert White, and his art, which is featured in the String Poet journal. Claire also read two poems, which can be found in this issue.

All of this leading up to the culmination of the evening, the emotional peak — as the journal was launched, J. D. Smith read his winning poem, “Upkeep,” followed by Barry Tognolini’s premiere of his inspired composition, “Tristezza”.

The video has highlights of the evening, including poetry by Kim Bridgford, Muriel Harris Weinstein, Maxine Silverman, and J. D. Smith, and music performance by Barry Tognolini.

Letter from the Editor

Poetry

David Axelrod
Ned Balbo
Donna Barkman
Bruce Bennett
Patricia Brody
Daniel Brown
Patricia Callan
Linda Fischer
Meri Harary Fleischman
Gretchen Fletcher
Carl James Grindley
Joan Higuchi
Karen Kelsay
Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis
Ann Eichler Kolakowski
W.F. Lantry
Steven Lautermilch
Cindy Hunter Morgan
Carol Louise Munn
Matt Pasca
Maxine Silverman
J.D. Smith
Patti Tana
Marly Youmans
Muriel Harris Weinstein
Claire Nicolas White

Translation

Catherine Chandler
Steve Lautermilch
Claire Nicolas White

Featured Artist

Robert W. White

Featured Musician

Barry Tognolini

First Prize:

“Upkeep” – J.D. Smith

Second Place:

“The Strauses Return to Broadway” – Patricia Brody

Third Place:

“Palimpsest: Fez” – Maxine Silverman

Honorable Mentions:

“Mourning at the Kaldi Café” – Carol Louise Munn
“The Taste of Tea” – Muriel Harris Weinstein

Look for these folks, along with other String Poet Prize finalists and fine poets in the forthcoming issue of String Poet, and also see our 2012 String Poet Prize Award Ceremony.

Saturday, March 31^st at 5:00 PM

The Long Island Violin Shop
8 Elm Street
Huntington, NY 11743-3402
Admission: $8 at the door.
Directions

There are a few tickets available at the door. Doors open at 4:45 PM.

Annabelle Moseley is the author of one full-length collection and six chapbooks of poetry, a young adult novel, and a collection of children’s poetry. Her full-length collection: The Clock of the Long Now, was published in January 2012 by David Robert Books. Her most recent chapbooks are A Field Guide to the Muses (Finishing Line Press, 2009), and The Divine Tour (forthcoming 2012, Finishing Line Press). The first Walt Whitman Birthplace Writer-in-Residence, 2009-2010, Moseley is also founder and editor of String Poet, an online literary journal of poetry and the arts, and the host of The New York Times-featured String Poet Studio Series and founder of the national String Poet Prize. She is also a Lecturer at St. Joseph’s College. Moseley has published hundreds of poems internationally in such journals as The Texas Review, The Seventh Quarry (Wales), Marsh Hawk Review, and Mezzo Cammin, among others. Her first three chapbooks of poetry, published from 2005 to 2008 include: The Moon is a Lemon (Birnham Wood), Artifacts of Sound (Street Press), and Still Life (Street Press). Annabelle Moseley’s fourth chapbook is First and Last Things, a shared collection with the Welsh poet J. C. Evans, published jointly in New York and Wales by Cross-Cultural Communications. Moseley won first place in the 2008 Writer’s Digest Poetry Contest and a 2008 Amy Award from Poets & Writers.

Mr. Schaff is a free-lance violinist in the greater New York area and performs regularly as a tenured member with many of the leading symphony, opera, and ballet ensembles in the region, in addition to frequent chamber and recital collaborations. In recent seasons he has appeared with the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra on their North American tour, the American Symphony Orchestra, the Stamford Symphony, Long Island Philharmonic, Northeastern Pennsylvania Philharmonic, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Glimmerglass Opera Festival, and on Broadway in “The Producers” and “Wicked”, and in Paul Shaffer’s orchestra on “The Late Show” with David Letterman. He is the concertmaster of the SONOS Chamber Orchestra in New York City. His second CD of vocal chamber music with tenor Martin Dillon was released in 2004 on Ganymede Records, and he is currently working on a recording project which juxtaposes contemporary music for solo violin with Bach’s B minor Partita, as well as recent live performances with pianists Richard Alston and Thomas Carlo Bo, which explore unjustly neglected works of the grand Romantic tradition of the 19th century. He is the founder and Artistic Director of the Englewood Chamber Players, a non-profit organization which brings together some of the finest musicians in the New York area who perform music of the highest caliber for the communities in which they live, as well as traveling to those unable to attend traditional concerts.

Saturday, February 18^th at 5:00 PM

The Long Island Violin Shop
8 Elm Street
Huntington, NY 11743-3402
Open Mic to follow
Directions

Linda Opyr is the Nassau County Poet Laureate (2011-2013). She is the author of six collections of poetry. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, journals, magazines, and newspapers, including The Hudson Review, The Atlanta Review, The Paterson Literary Review, and The New York Times. Dr. Opyr holds a Doctor of Arts degree in English and American Literature from St. John’s University. She is an adjunct professor at Nassau Community College and chairs the English Department at Sewanhaka High School.

Nassau County Poet Laureate for 2009-2011, Gayl Teller received an MA from Columbia University and another MA from Queens College, CUNY. Her poetry collections are At the Intersection of Everything You Have Ever Loved, Shorehaven, Moving Day, One Small Kindness, and most recently, Inside the Embrace, which was selected in national competition and published by WordTech/Cherry Grove in 2010. She is the editor of Toward Forgiveness, an anthology of poems (Writers Ink Press, 2011).

Maxwell Corydon Wheat, Jr. was the first Poet Laureate of Nassau County (2007-2009). In 1980 he received the first Herman Melville Annual Award from the New York State Marine Education Assocation, whose journal, Ripples, he edited for many years. Author of several poetry chapbooks, he is known for his support of the Paumanok Poets, and tireless encouragement of young writers. For years he conducted an October salt marsh (when the marsh’s Spartina grasses turn golden) round-robin participatory poetry reading program at Cedarmere, Roslyn Harbor, home of the 19th Century poet William Cullen Bryant, where Maxwell volunteered in programming.

Janet Packer has established a unique career as a concert violinist and educator. Her performances demonstrate a mastery of a wide range of musical styles. As soloist with orchestra, recitalist, and recording artist, Ms. Packer’s musical intelligence and personality have won the accolades of audiences, critics, and musical colleagues. Janet Packer’s major orchestral appearances include performances with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, National Symphony of Panama, Rochester Philharmonic, and Boston Pops Orchestra. She was chair of the Conservatory string department of the Longy School of Music, Cambridge, Massachusetts, for twelve years. She gives frequent master classes at universities, music schools, and string seminars.

Geoffrey Burleson is Director of Piano Studies at Hunter College. Mr. Burleson has performed to wide acclaim throughout Europe and North America, and is equally active as a recitalist, concerto soloist, chamber musician and jazz performer. The New York Times has hailed his solo performances as “vibrant and compelling”, furthermore praising his “rhythmic brio, projection of rhapsodic qualities, appropriate sense of spontaneity, and rich colorings.” A graduate of the Peabody Conservatory, New England Conservatory, and Stony Brook University (D.M.A.), his principal teachers include Gilbert Kalish, Leonard Shure, Veronica Jochum, Lillian Freundlich, Tinka Knopf, and Audrey Bart Brown.

C.B. Anderson
Bruce Bennett
Patricia Brody
Sarah Busse
Maryann Corbett
Barbara Crooker
Graham Everett
Michael Ferris
Claudia Gary
Geraldine Green
George Held
Ann Eichler Kolakowski
Jean L. Kreiling
W.F. Lantry
John Milbury-Steen
Barbara Novack
Carolyn Raphael
J.D. Smith

Translation

Hong Ai Bai and John Digby
Maryann Corbett
Uche Ogbuji

Featured Artist

Steve Forster

Featured Musician

Pedro de Alcantara

March 29, 2012: 2012 String Poet Prize Results announced.

Feb 25, 2012: Submissions have closed for the 2012 String Poet Prize

Up to 40 lines, all forms accepted.  Contest theme: “Remembrance.” No previously published poems, or poems that have won previous prizes.  Winner receives $200 and composition of original music by professional composer inspired by the winning poem, to be performed live at awards ceremony. Winner and Runners-up published in Spring 2012 issue of String Poet and invited to read at the Award Ceremony on May 25^th; all contest submissions are considered for publication in journal.

Entry Fees: $10.00 for up to 3 poems, $15.00 for up to 5 poems.
Submissions deadline: February 25, 2012

Final Judge: Kim Bridgford. Dr. Bridgford is the director of both the West Chester University Poetry Center and the West Chester Poetry Conference. She is editor-in-chief of Mezzo Cammin, and founder of the Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project, designed to become the world’s largest database of women poets. She is the founder of the literary journal Dogwood, and is the author of five collections of poetry, including In The Extreme, winner of the Donald Justice Prize.

Composer: Australian pianist and composer Barry Tognolini has been performing professionally since the age of thirteen, when he became a regular guest on a TV variety program showcasing young talent in Perth, West Australia. Since that time, he has enjoyed a varied and rewarding career, referred to by New Idea magazine as “pianist to the rich and famous.” Barry has performed with Celine Dion in a concert for children in Perth, and with Andrea Bocelli, Sara Brightman, Lara Fabian and Katherine McPhee at an exclusive concert at the Dallas Country Club. Barry has performed on the QE2, has toured with the African Children’s Choir, and has guest starred at the New South Wales Premier’s Concerts in the Sydney Entertainment Center- an event that attracted over thirty thousand patrons. However, his most memorable touring performance was a concert in Tirano — a little village high up in the Italian Alps where his ancestors once lived. Having released previous CDs with Sony Music Australia as well as his own label, Barry’s latest recording project is “Treasure Road,” a 24-track double CD collection featuring both well-known and original compositions.

Last year’s String Poet Prize was selected by finalist judge Patricia Fargnoli, and awarded to Pramila Venkateswaran for her poem, “Kummi Dance,” which was set to music by composer Beth Anderson. At the awards ceremony, judge Patricia Fargnoli gave a reading, along with Ms. Venkateswaran and the other contest finalists. The evening culminated in a performance of Beth Anderson’s “Kummi Dance,” performed by Beth Anderson (piano) and David Wong (violin).