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Salem College - National Literary Awards

Rita Dove Poetry Award

The Salem College Center for Women Writers is pleased to announce its fifth annual National Literary Awards with increased monetary prizes: the Rita Dove Poetry Award for a poem of any style up to 100 lines (up to 2 poems per submission)

The winner in will receive a prize of $1,200. An honorarium of $150 will be given to two honorable mentions named. Competitions are open to both women and men who live in the United States and write in English except current Salem College employees and students. All submissions must be unpublished. The postmark deadline is February 1, 2008. Winners will be announced by May 1, 2008.

The author’s name and address must not appear anywhere on the manuscript. Entrants must satisfy all of the following requirements when entering the competition: send three clean typed copies of the manuscript (double space all prose entries); a SASE for notification of winners; a cover sheet, including name, address, telephone, e-mail, genre (fiction, nonfiction or poetry), word count (for prose) and the title of the work (s); and a check for the $15 reading fee, per submission, made out to the Salem College CWW National Literary Awards. Please send submission (s) to:

Center for Women Writers
Salem College
PO Box 10548
Winston-Salem, NC 27108-0548

Former poet laureate of the United States Rita Dove is the youngest person and the first African American to be named to this post. She is the winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Thomas and Beulah, a collection of interrelated poems loosely based on her grandparents’ life. A 2006 recipient of the coveted Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service, Dove is the Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

About The Judge

The 2007 judge for the Rita Dove Poetry Award is Naomi Shihab Nye. Nye is the prize-winning author and editor of numerous books of poetry and prose, including You and Yours, which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award; 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, which was a finalist for the National Book Award; A Maze Me; and You and Yours,a best-selling poetry book of 2006. Her new book of essays, I’ll Ask You Three Times, Are you Okay? Tales of Driving and Being Driven, will be released in the fall of 2007. The poetry editor for The Texas Observer, Nye received The Academy of American Poet’s Lavan Award, four Pushcart Prizes along with other accolades. She lives in San Antonio, Texas.