The California State Poetry Society is pleased to announce its 35th Annual Poetry Contest.
Submissions Accepted March 1st – June 30th, 2022
$100, $50, $25 Cash for 1st, 2nd and 3rd Prizes,
Plus Publication in the California Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 4 (2022 Winter)
Reading fees: Members, $3.00/poem; Non-members, $6.00/poem
Winners will be announced in September 2022. Submissions are now welcome of original poems with 80-line (two-page) limit per poem. Submissions are only accepted by mail.
Send a cover letter with all poet information (mailing address, email address, name, phone) and a list of the submitted poems, as well as one copy of each poem with no poet identification, and a check for the reading fees to:
CSPS Annual Contest Chair
P.O. Box 4288 Sunland, CA 91041-4288
CONTEST JUDGE: FRANK IOSUE
Frank Iosue is a poet and a member of the Arizona State Poetry Society and The Tucson Poetry Society. In April 2021, it was his pleasure and privilege to be a judge for the National Federation Of State Poetry Society's Annual Contest, judging over 150 submissions for The Poetry Society of Texas Award. He holds a B.A. in English from California State University, Los Angeles, and an MFA in Creative Writing / Poetry from The University of Iowa / Writer's Workshop.
Iosue is the author of 11 chapbooks of poetry, and a volume of Collected Poems: The Au Revoir Of An Enormous Us, published in 2017. He has conducted a number of writing workshops, and has been a featured reader at venues around Southern Arizona for over 20 years.
ABOUT IOSUE'S COLLECTED POEMS
Iosue writes: "A poem is an arena of apprehensions and associations; a "psychic ecosystem" unto itself, bounded, artificed and amplified through craft and language. Experience, emotion, imagination, intellect and artistry -- in a unique, uneasy marriage between what's thought and what's felt -- cohabitate on the page, expressly for the end of approximating (and, hopefully, achieving) the most resonant and illimitable expression of a poetic "reality." In my poems, I seek to create experiences that destabilize and scavenge ordinary perception, and transform the "apparent" into epiphanies of revelation and realization.
"This collection contains the inventory of my life's poetic journey. The joys, sorrows, memories, and reveries; the people and places, the histories, and the voyages of imagination that populate these pages, form my testament to a world, whose presences, and absences, have accompanied me, and formed the fragile scaffolding for the little empire of my existence -- an intensely-felt world of a self, of an I, intimately environed and occupied by a brilliant otherness of those, and them, and it and you . . . An Enormous Us!"
THE ARCANE REVERIES