Elizabeth Boatwright Coker Student Prize in Poetry
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Winner: Gus Varallo is a writer and full-time undergraduate student at the University of South Carolina studying English and Spanish. His writing has previously been published in Rattle's Young Poets Anthology as well as Garnet and Black magazine, and he was the winner of the 2024 Havilah Babcock Poetry Contest at USC. When not writing, Varallo likes to play (and subsequently lose) games of Magic: The Gathering with his friends.
Judge Kristin Robertson’s comments on Gus Varallo’s poetry: This collection of poems had me at Radioshack, at power cords, at Phillies games. Specificity in poems almost always wins out, as this manuscript illustrates so well. I lovedthe first poem “Fixing the Cable Box” with its resonant line breaks, including “only grownups walk / alone” and “stop me / from growing up.” And this one: “dust is really dead / skin cells, packed over decades.” What’s most impressive about these poems are their last lines. Many poets give us too much or not enough, but this one gets it just right, such as at the end of “From the Peak of Bolonia Beach”: “Some are climbing up to you.” I also liked the brief moments of ekphrasis in here: “Pollock’s tangles stretch farther / than veins.” In the end, though, it was the details, the wonderful balance of the low and high particulars that pushed this manuscript to the top. Give me Nerf guns and archangels in the same poem any day. |
Deadline: Ended March 20, 2025
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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 Submit up to 5 unpublished poems (totaling no more than 10 pages).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 will be Kristin Robertson. Questions about the Coker Student Prize in Poetry should be sent to: [email protected]. |
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Kristin Robertson is the author of Surgical Wing published by Alice James Books in 2017 and Chance of Lightning, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry and forthcoming in April 2025 from the University of North Texas Press. Her poetry appears in Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Harvard Review, The Southern Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review Online, Five Points, and many other journals. Kristin is an assistant professor of writing and literature at Mercer University and lives in Georgia.
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