Belle Letters: A Different Poetry Contest
Do alphabetical letters stand out in your writing? Finally a contest for those for whom letters aren’t just the wallpaper of poetry—they are the windows into it. Belle Letters is a contest looking for poems in which letters are foregrounded as vital and imaginative elements of imagery and content.
With support from Poetry Daily and the Virginia Arts of the Book Center, Belle Letters features a prize that will illuminate one poem in a limited edition letterpress broadside and anthologize it for a year among the works on Poetry Daily’s internationally reviewed website.
Grand Prize:
30 limited edition, letterpressed broadsides, created by artists at the VABC, and special publication of the winning Belle Letters poem on Poetry Daily (poems.com).
Contest Guidelines:
Submission size: A maximum of two poems per submission. Each submission should have a separate entry fee and form.
Entry fee: $10 made payable to the “Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.”
(The VABC is a program of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.)
Entry form: Download the entry form here. For a printed form, send an SASE to: Belle Letters / Virginia Foundation for the Humanities /145 Ednam Drive / Charlottesville, VA 22903. Submissions received without a completed entry form will not be eligible.
Eligibility: Contest open to any poet(s) living and writing in the United States who are not employees, affiliates, or students of Poetry Daily, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and the University of Virginia Creative Writing Program. Rights to works must reside with the submitting poets, though they may have been previously published in journals, chapbooks, or books. Poems must be original work by eligible submitters.
Considerations: No poem should be no longer than one 8.5”x11” page in 12 pt font. Poems should be stapled together and submitted “blind,” with identifying information appearing only on the entry form.
Deadline: Submissions must be postmarked by June 1, 2007.
Notification: Winners will be announced in August 2007.
Judges: Poets and artists of the Virginia Arts of the Book Center. Selections will be made on literary merit and visual interest as a broadside.
Judges are poets whose backgrounds are in publishing and book arts. Each has editorial experience with journals, anthologies, and/or prize committees, including the Virginia Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, Little Big Form, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association. Their poems are published
in journals such as Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Antioch Review, FENCE, Third Coast, Ploughshares, Quarterly West, VOLT, and Los Angeles Review.
