The Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize for Younger Poets

The Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize has been established by The American Poetry Review to honor the late Stanley Kunitz’s dedication to mentoring poets. The winning poem will appear on the feature page of the September/October 2010 issue of The American Poetry Review, and the poet will receive a prize of $1,000.  All entrants will receive a copy of the magazine.  Poets may submit one to three poems per entry (totaling no more than three pages) with a $15 entry fee by May 15, 2010. No limit on number of entries per poet. The editors of The American Poetry Review will judge submissions anonymously, in compliance with the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses’ Code of Ethics.

Guidelines

1. Poets must be under 40 years of age.
2. All entries must be previously unpublished poems.
3. Do not include any identifying information on subsequent pages except for the title of the work.
4. Enclose a $15.00 reading fee and a SASE for contest results. Multiple entries are acceptable; however each entry must be accompanied by a reading fee.
5. Entry fee covers up to three poems, totaling no more than three pages.
6. Contest entries must be postmarked between March 1, 2010 and May 15, 2010. Entries submitted outside of the reading period will be disqualified.
7. Contest results will be sent by July1, 2010.

 

Send submissions to:

The American Poetry Review

Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize

1700 Sansom Street, Suite 800

Philadelphia, PA 19103.

 

 

 

Melissa Stein has been chosen as the winner of the 2010 APR/Honickman First Book Prize by this year’s judge Mark Doty for her manuscript Rough Honey.

Melissa Stein’s poems have appeared in Southern Review, New England Review, Best New Poets 2009, North American Review, Indiana Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She has received residency fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Djerassi Foundation. She is a freelance editor and writer in San Francisco.

Rough Honey is suffused with a dark tenderness. These poems speak of fragility and power, the contradictions of pleasure, the bruises we bear. With remarkable range, they carry us from a whitewater rafting calamity to the “torrents of wheat” on a family farm; from a bathysphere’s color-starved depths to a butcher’s blood-soaked counter; from a peepshow’s “manageable storm of boredom and sex” to a passionate fall from grace in an orchard. By turns buoyant and forlorn, Rough Honey’s characters both long for and abandon hope of true connection, of home, in a world where “everything is rented.” But their struggles are rendered in language so radiant and—yes—mellifluous it can’t help but hint at the possibility of transcendence, the sheer sweetness in being alive.

Established in 1993, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award is presented annually by Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California, for a first book by a poet of genuine promise. This honor was bestowed upon Matthew Dickman for his book All-American Poem, published by APR as the winner of the 2008 Honickman First Book Prize. For more information about the Kate Tufts Discovery Award: http://www.cgu.edu/tufts/tuftswinners.html