Welcome to the eighth annual Margaret Reid Poetry Contest sponsored by Tom Howard Books. First prize is $3,000. A total of $5,550 in prizes will be awarded. Click here to read the winning poems from past contests.

Poetry in traditional verse forms. Your entry should be your own original work. You may submit the same poem simultaneously to this contest and to others, and you may submit poems that have been published or won prizes elsewhere, as long as you own the online publication rights.

What are traditional verse forms? By traditional verse, we mean any form of poetry that has been in circulation for 50 years or more. The poems you submit should follow some kind of formal or informal pattern. This pattern might involve rhyme, meter, length of line, repetition, or some other pattern, strict or loose. Forms that qualify include free verse (as exemplified by such poets as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Walt Whitman, Stephen Spender), “sprung” verse (Gerard Manley Hopkins), narrative verse (Alfred Noyes), satirical verse (e.e. cummings: “my sweet old etcetera”; Dorothy Parker), nonsense verse (Edward Lear), lyric verse (Tennyson), romantic verse (Wordsworth), religious verse (James Russell Lowell), children’s verse (A.A. Milne), comic verse and parodies (W.S. Gilbert, A.P. Herbert), sonnets, haiku, ghazals, ballads, odes, villanelles, sestinas, songs, hymns, etc. For your reference, this Glossary of Poetic Terms describes many forms. You may also enjoy sites for traditional and exotic forms of poetry found on our resource pages.

Prizes and Publication
First prize: $3,000. Second prize: $1,000. Third prize: $400. Fourth prize: $250. There will also be six Most Highly Commended Awards of $150 each. The top 10 entries will be published on the Winning Writers website (over one million page views per year) and announced in Tom Howard Contest News and the Winning Writers Newsletter, a combined audience of over 35,000 readers.

Deadline
June 30, 2011. Your entry must be postmarked or submitted online by this date.

How to enter: http://www.winningwriters.com/contests/margaret/ma_guidelines.php