Coker Poetry

Elizabeth Boatwright Coker Fellowship in Poetry

Winner: Sophie Farthing is a queer writer living in South Carolina. Her poetry is forthcoming or has appeared in outlets including Impostor Journal, Right Hand Pointing, Impossible Archetype, and Anti-Heroin Chic. Her poetry is also featured in the horror anthology It Always Finds Me from Querencia Press.

Deadline: Ended February 29, 2024

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 Submit up to 5 unpublished poems (totaling no more than 10 pages).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 will be Ashley Mace Havird.

Questions about the Coker Fellowship in Poetry should be sent to: [email protected].

Ashley Mace Havird is a poet and novelist who grew up on a tobacco farm in South Carolina. Her collection of poems, Wild Juice (LSU Press, 2021), is the 53rd volume of the Southern Messenger Poets Series. The Garden of The Fugitives (Texas Review Press, 2014) won the X. J. Kennedy Prize for Poetry. Her debut novel Lightningstruck (Mercer University Press, 2016), won the Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction.

Her poems and short stories have appeared in many journals including Shenandoah, The Southern Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, and in anthologies such as The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume IV: Louisiana and Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry. Poet Laureate of Caddo Parish from 2018-2021, Ashley lives in Shreveport, Louisiana, with her husband, the poet David Havird, and their own best dog in the world.