Coker Student Poetry Winner

Elizabeth Boatwright Coker Student Prize in Poetry

Winner: Azi Kynard is a junior at the College of Charleston majoring in Middle Grades Education with a concentration in English. She enjoys reading and writing in her free time. Her goal is to teach English or Creative Writing at the middle school level.

Judge Rachel Hadas comments on the poems of Azi Kynard:
The poems in the winning entry are marked by their fluency and poise, their urgency and authority. “what we found” and “petrichor” in particular have a prophetic ring; the utterance seems to spill out unhesitatingly. Personal memories (ham hocks and collard greens; brown swamp water) resonate beyond the speaker, who (again, prophet-like) seems somehow to be speaking for all of us.
The language is clear and compelling in all the poems in this entry—comprehensible and engaging without cliche. The two long poems remind me a little of Walt Whitman, but without Whitman’s grandiloquence. I grope to find words for just where this remarkable young poet’s distinctive strength
lies; recognizing their voice was easier than describing it. Maybe one word I’m looking for is confidence—this writer’s justified confidence in the power of their perception and their voice.

Deadline: Ended March 20, 2025

The Elizabeth Boatwright Coker Student Prize 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 college student poets in the state of South Carolina.

Award is $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 Submit up to 5 unpublished poems (totaling no more than 10 pages).

Entry is free.

We will accept entries in doc, docx, rtf, and pdf file formats.

Applicants must be 18-25 years old at the time of submission, legal residents of South Carolina, and enrolled full time at a private or public South Carolina institution of higher education. Applicants also must not have won this prize (previously known as the Carrie McCray Nickens Student Prize 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 Coker Student Prize in Poetry should be sent to: [email protected].

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/