Elizabeth Boatwright Coker Fellowship in Poetry
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Layle Chambers
Layle Keane Chambers is a performing poet, author, and educator from Folly Beach, SC. She currently serves as Vice President of The Poetry Society of South Carolina. She is a Professor Emeritus of Theatre with an MFA in Creative Writing from New Mexico State University, and her debut chapbook, Caught in the Light is forthcoming (Finishing Line Press, January 23, 2026). Her poetry has appeared in Collateral, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, The Things We Carry Still (Middle West Press), and Proud To Be V. 13 & 14 (GreenTower Press). She is a recipient of the Poetry Society of South Carolina’s Perception Prize and a proud Air Force mom. Judge Rachel Hadas comments on the poems of Layle Chambers: In the entry intriguingly entitled “The Physics of Liminality,” all the poems stand out for several reasons: their formal awareness, ambition, and achievement; their clear thematic through-line; and the speedy, almost headlong pace of their syntax. The sonnet, ghazal, sestina, and villanelle that comprise this entry are each named for a chemical or physical process of transformation. Aptly, these poems fill the containers of their formal structures with the intensely subjective, emotional, and mercurial matter of anxiety and longing. Together, the poems work variations on recurrent images and preoccupations: motherhood, flight (bird; plane), memory, distance, danger, and, unspoken but omnipresent, love. This rich and unified brief sequence, though it’s only four poems long, encapsulates a narrative that seems to expand in space and time. Impressive, distinctive, and memorable. |
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The Elizabeth Boatwright Coker Fellowship in Poetry, supported by the Penelope Coker Hall/Eliza Wilson Ingle Fund of Central Carolina Community Foundation and sponsored by the South Carolina Academy of Authors, recognizes the talent of fiction poets in the state of South Carolina.
The award is $1,250 and an invitation to be honored at the SCAA Induction Ceremony. There is no restriction on form or content. Submit up to 5 unpublished poems (totaling no more than 10 pages). You may submit multiple entries, but each entry must be accompanied with entry fee. Entry fee is $20 per entry. We will accept entries in doc, docx, rtf, and pdf file formats. Applicants must be full-time residents of South Carolina and must not have won this fellowship (previously known as the Carrie McCray Nickens Fellowship in Poetry) in the previous three years. Your name should not appear anywhere on the poems submitted. Include contact information in the appropriate fields along with a brief bio in the cover letter field on the submission manager. Be sure to click on the correct SC Academy of Authors submission link. This year’s final judge was Rachel Hadas. Questions about the Elizabeth Boatwright Coker Fellowship in Poetry should be sent to: [email protected]. |
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Rachel Hadas is an American poet, teacher, essayist, and translator. Her most recent poetry collection is Pastorals (2025). Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ingram Merrill Foundation Grants, the O.B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Hadas taught English at Rutgers University-Newark from 1981 to 2023, and was named a Board of Governors Professor in 2001. She has also taught courses in literature and writing at Columbia and Princeton Universities, the Ninety-second Street Y, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the West Chester Poetry Conference, and the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center. https://www.rachelhadas.net/
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