Adult Contests and Awards

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The North Carolina Poetry Society sponsors a variety of awards for adult poets, published annually in Pinesong.  

Our current round of contests opened on December 1, 2024 and will close on February 1, 2025.

  • Entries must be original, unpublished (either in print or on-line), and in English.
  • We will disqualify, without notification, any entry that exceeds the line limit or that is the wrong form for a given contest.
  • You may submit one poem per contest.
  • You may not enter the same poem into more than one contest.
  • Poems may be simultaneously submitted elsewhere.
  • If a poem is accepted elsewhere, immediately notify the NCPS by sending an email to pinesongaward@gmail.com with “WITHDRAW” in the subject line.
  • Withdrawn poems cannot be replaced.

All submissions will be judged blind: the judges will not know the identity of the poems’ authors.

You may not enter a contest if:

  • you won first place for that contest in 2022
  • you are a current member of the NCPS Board
  • you sponsor or endow the contest
  • you are a family member, close friend, or current student of the contest’s judge

No poem will be selected if:

  • the judge recognizes its author
  • the poem includes the poet’s name
  • the poem includes graphics, images, or pictures
  • the poem exceeds the maximum number of lines for the contest
  • the poet’s dues are not current or the required fee has not been paid

Judges reserve the right not to give awards. NCPS reserves the right to cancel a contest or reduce the number of prizes if there are too few submissions.

To conform to the format of the Pinesong Awards Anthology, NCPS reserves the right to work with the poet to reformat prose poems or poems with long lines.

See below for requirements specific to each contest and for submission instructions.

The winner of the Poet Laureate Award, and the first and second place winners of each contest will receive cash prizes.  These poets, plus the finalists for the Poet Laureate Award, and the honorable mentions for each contest, will be invited to read their poems during Awards Day. Award winning poems and honorable mentions will be published in the Pinesong Awards Anthology.  (Poet Laureate Finalists will not be printed in Pinesong so that their poems may remain eligible for other contests or publications.)

To receive an offered prize, the author must agree to grant first publication rights to the North Carolina Poetry Society.  Otherwise, the offer is withdrawn.  After the publication of Pinesong, publication rights will return to the authors.

CONTESTS

Poet Laureate Award:

Sponsored by Press 53

  • A single prize of $200 for a serious poem, any subject, any style, with a maximum of 110 lines (including poem title, any epigraph, blank lines, and lines of text)
  • Open to poets currently residing in North Carolina
  • Fee: $10 for current NCPS members, $15 for non-members. The fee is waived for lifetime members
  • An intermediate judge will select 10 finalists
  • North Carolina’s poet laureate, Jaki Shelton Green, will select the winning poem
  • Winning poem will be published in Pinesong
  • Finalists will be invited to read at Awards Day, but their poems will not be published in Pinesong
  • Use this form to submit your entry to this award.

Jaki Shelton Green, ninth Poet Laureate of North Carolina, is a 2019 Academy of American Poet Laureate Fellow, 2014 NC Literary Hall of Fame Inductee, 2009 NC Piedmont Laureate appointment, and 2003 recipient of the North Carolina Award for Literature.  She is the author of nine poetry collections, a poetry LP, and CD’s. 

Other Adult Categories

Entry Guidelines:

  • No fee for active members of the North Carolina Poetry Society
  • $5.00 fee per contest for non-members
  • Entrants do not have to be residents of North Carolina
  • Only one poem per contest may be submitted
  • A poem may not be submitted to more than one contest

Awards:

  • $100 for first place, $50 for second place
  • Up to three honorable mentions in each contest

Poems limited to 36 lines
(including title, epigraph, blank lines, and lines of text)

Alice Osborn Award

Sponsored by Alice Osborn
Judge: Erica Goss
Poems in any form, any style, written by adults for children 2 to 12 years of age

Use this form to submit your entry to this award.

Erica Goss is the author of Landscape with Womb and Paradox, forthcoming from Broadstone Books in 2025, and Night Court, winner of the 2017 Lyrebird Award from Glass Lyre Press. She has received numerous Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations, as well as a 2023 Best American Essay Notable. Recent and upcoming publications include The Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, Oregon Humanities, Creative Nonfiction, North Dakota Quarterly, Gargoyle, Spillway, West Trestle, A-Minor, Redactions, Consequence, The Sunlight Press, The Pedestal, San Pedro River Review, and Critical Read. Erica served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California, from 2013-2016. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she teaches, writes and edits the newsletter Sticks & Stones.
 

Carol Bessent Hayman Poetry of Love Award

Sponsored by David Manning
Judge: Lola Haskins
Any form, any style, on the theme of love

Use this form to submit your entry to this award.

Lola Haskins’ latest poetry collection, Homelight (Charlotte Lit Press, 2023), was named Poetry Book of the Year by Southern Literary Review.  The one before that, Asylum (University of Pittsburgh, 2019), was featured in the NYT Magazine. Past honors include the Iowa Poetry Prize, two NEAs, two Florida Book Awards, narrative poetry prizes from Southern Poetry Review and New England Poetry Review, a Florida’s Eden prize for environmental writing, and the Emily Dickinson prize from Poetry Society of America.   She has served as Chancellor for the Florida State Poets Association since 2016.

Katherine Kennedy McIntyre Light Verse Award

Sponsored by Diana Pinckney
Judge: Chapman Hood Frazier
Light verse in any form, any style, including limericks

Use this form to submit your entry to this award.

Chapman Hood Frazier’s The Lost Books of the Bestiary was published in 2023 by V Press LC. His work has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Poetry Review, and has won numerous awards. Currently a Professor Emeritus from James Madison University, he lives in Virginia co-managing Bellfield Farm LLC, a writer’s retreat.

Mary Ruffin Poole American Heritage Award

Endowed by Pepper Worthington
Judge: Christine Potter
Any form, any style, on the theme of American heritage, sibling-hood, or nature

Use this form to submit your entry to this award.

Christine Potter is the poetry editor of Eclectica Magazine.  Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Grain, Tar River Poetry, Mobius, ONE ART, The McNeese Review, and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily.  Her time-traveling young adult novels, The Bean Books, are published by Evernight Teen, and her most recent collection of poetry, Unforgetting, is on Kelsay Books. Christine lives in the Hudson River Valley with her husband, Ken, an indulged and chonky cat named Bella, and a few ghosts; her house is very old.

Poetry of Courage Award

Endowed by Ann Campanella
Judge: Ray McManus
Any form, any style, on the theme of courage or crisis

Use this form to submit your entry to this award.

Ray McManus is the author of four books of poetry: The Last Saturday in America, Punch., Red Dirt Jesus, and Driving through the Country before You Are Born, as well as the coeditor of the anthology Found Anew: Poetry and Prose Inspired by the South Caroliniana Library Digital Collections. Ray’s poems have been published in numerous journals such as Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, POETRY, and The Birmingham Poetry Review to name a few. In 2023, Ray received the South Carolina Governor’s Awards for the Arts, the highest honor the state gives in the arts.

Bruce Lader Poetry of Witness Award

Sponsored by Doug Stuber
Judge: Matt Donovan
Any form, any style, addressing contemporary events or issues

Use this form to submit your entry to this award.

Matt Donovan is the author of four books and two chapbooks, including, most recently, We Are Not Where We Are (an erasure of Thoreau’s Walden co-authored with Jenny George), and The Dug-Up Gun Museum (BOA 2022). His work has appeared in numerous journals, including AGNI, American Poetry Review, The Believer, Kenyon Review, The New England Review, Poetry, Threepenny Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Creative Capital Grant, a Pushcart Prize, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. Donovan serves as Director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College. 

Jean Williams Poetry of Disability, Disease, and Healing Award

Endowed by Priscilla Webster-Williams
Judge: Stacey R. Nigliazzo
Any form, any style, on the theme of disability, disease, and/or healing

Use this form to submit your entry to this award.

Stacy R. Nigliazzo is a nurse, an MFA fellow at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, and the award-winning author of three poetry books (Press 53). She is a founding member of the Humanities Expression & Arts Lab (HEAL) at Baylor College of Medicine. Her work has appeared in JAMA, Ploughshares, and the Beloit Poetry Journal, among other publications. She was a finalist for the 2024 Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry (New Letters Magazine). 

Poems with different line or form requirements

Bloodroot Haiku Award

Sponsored by Bill Griffin
Judge: Michael Dylan Welch
Contemporary English language haiku (untitled)

Use this form to submit your entry to this award.

Michael Dylan Welch likes to be surprised by empathy and gratitude in haiku, has been active with haiku for more than 40 years, and joined the Haiku Society of America in 1987.  He founded his press, Press Here, in 1989, edited Woodnotes from 1989 to 1997, and Tundra from 1998 to 2001, co-edits First Frost, and serves as haiku editor for Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine.  Michael co-founded the Haiku North America conference in 1991 and the American Haiku Archives in 1996, and founded the Seabeck Haiku Getaway in 2008 and National Haiku Writing Month (www.nahaiwrimo.com) in 2010.  Michael has won first place in the Henderson, Brady, Drevniok, and Tokutomi haiku contests, among others, and his poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of publications, translated into more than twenty languages. His website, devoted mostly to haiku, is www.graceguts.com.

Charles Edward Eaton Award

Sponsored by anonymous friends of Charles Edward Eaton
Judge: Nicole Caruso Garcia
Sonnet or other traditional form, maximum of 50 lines (including poem title, any epigraph, blank lines, and lines of text)

Use this form to submit your entry to this award.

Nicole Caruso Garcia’s full-length debut OXBLOOD (Able Muse Press) recently won the International Book Award for narrative poetry, and her work appears in Light, Plume, Rattle, RHINO, and elsewhere.  She serves as associate poetry editor at Able Muse and as an executive board member at Poetry by the Sea, an annual poetry conference in Madison, CT.  Her poetry has received the Willow Review Award, won a 2021 Best New Poets honor, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Visit her at nicolecarusogarcia.com.

Robert Golden Award

Sponsored by Nexus Poets and Linda Golden
Judge: David Dodd Lee
Any form, any style, maximum of 70 lines (including poem title, any epigraph, blank lines, and lines of text)

Use this form to submit your entry to this award.

David Dodd Lee is the author of thirteen books of poetry, including two full-length volumes forthcoming in 2025, The Bay and The 574 Area Code’s Been Hit By the Blast. Dead Zones, a book of dictionary sonnets, is also due to appear in 2025. His poems have most recently appeared in New Ohio Review, Ocean State Review, Guesthouse, Southeast Review, TriQuarterly, The Nation, and Willow Springs. He writes and makes visual art in Northern Indiana. He is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University South Bend, where he is also Editor-in-Chief of 42 Miles Press, as well as the online literary magazine The Glacier.

How to Submit

This year we’ve changed the submission process for our adult contests. Each contest has its own submission form. The links for each contest form are included below. The link to pay for your submissions is the yellow “Donate” button listed below these submission guidelines. If you have any questions about your submission or entry, send them to: pinesongaward@gmail.com.

Please note: Submissions received after February 1, 2025 will not be accepted

Step 1: Use the form for each contest to submit your work.

Step 2: Total your submission fees and pay for your entries in a single transaction

    • Pay your submission fees online using PayPal or a credit card
      • Click on the Donate button below to open the payment page:
        • If you are entering the Poet Laureate contest, pay $10.00 if you are a member and $15.00 if you are not a member (fee is waived for Lifetime Members)
        • All other contests are free for members and $5.00 each for non-members
        • Add up your fees using this link: Entry Fee Calculator 
        • Click on the Donate button below with PayPal and enter that amount in the area provided