We were swept away…
…by the tremendous talent we witnessed in the
2017 Shadow Award poetry contest.
This contest yielded our highest turnout to date, making competition especially fierce. Once again, brilliant poet Mary Lenoir Bond did the heavy-lifting with the judging process. A huge thanks to Mary for all of her efforts, burning the midnight oil and giving each and every entry the thoughtful consideration it deserved.
We were also thrilled, once again, to see so many international submissions. The contest included entries from the United States, U.K., Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Portugal, India, and Indonesia. A huge thanks to everyone who sent us dark and offbeat poems. While we obviously can’t recognize all of your quality work here, we truly appreciate reading it. If you didn’t place in our contest, keep sending that poetry out into the world. We’d love to see it pop up in another journal.
And now on to the short list. The following writers had poems that made it through several rounds of cuts, but didn’t quite squeak into the Top 10.
Close-but-no-cigar shout-outs go to:
Ross Allison
Matilda Berke (2)
Janet Bowdan
C.M. Clark
Jason Conner
Celia Daniels
Nicholas De Genova
Katherine DeBlassie
Karen Fabiane
M.K. Foster
Lex Gomez
Stephen Ground
Katherine Anderson Howell
Erin Kirsh (2)
Frances Klein
Jennifer Lynn Krohn
Laura Lucas
Jennifer Martelli
Olivia McGill
Tim Murphy
Shea Newton
Amanda Niehaus
Michael O’Ryan
Amanda Oosthuizen
Valeri Paxton-Steele
Marquis Peacock
Christian Perry
Jayme Russell
Noam Shpancer
Eva Skrande
Fiona Smith
Arthur Stone
Nicole Vento
The Top 10 that you’ll find below will be published in our forthcoming Shadow Award poetry mega-issue, which will run by Monday, July 17th. They will also be included in this fall’s third-annual Prize Winners Anthology print issue, which will feature the Top 10 finishers from our quarterly flash fiction contests as well. You can check out last year’s Prize Winners Anthology here.
10th Place – “Unsacred Cow” by Christopher P. Mooney
9th Place – “Disco Vertigo” by Sam Morris
8th Place – “Why the Coyote Doesn’t Just Order Chinese”
by Phillip Provance
7th Place – “Kitchen, Sinister” by Laura Potts
6th Place – “Fingers for the Ferryman” by Dan Diehn
5th Place – “Soft and Supple Flesh” by Nicholas De Genova
4th Place – “The Message” by Susan Adler George
And now for those poems that really hit the mark.
3rd Place ($50)
“Elements Lost and Found”
by Mori Glaser
2nd Place ($100)
“Elegy for Nuestra Señora la Reina ”
by Matilda Berke
The Molotov Cocktail 