Elise Kazanjian & Ellen Woods Prose Poem Prize
First Prize: $100
Second Prize: $50
Third Prize: $25
Category Details
A prose poem should look like prose, no line breaks, and read like poetry. The Eastern Iowa Review puts it: “A Prose Poem is more than a narrative story told in a generic way; there is surprise in the language, variety in sentence length, but always the unexpected.” For an example, see Grace Marie Grafton’s “Daft.” Each prose poem 200 words or less single-spaced, each on separate pages, three poems per entry. Amaze us.
About Judges/Sponsors
ELLEN WOODS (Oakland, CA) writes poetry and memoir. She is author of The Watchful Heart Recedes, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press, and Warriors in Transition: A Memoir in Twenty-Eight Stories (Word Project Press 2014). Her poetry appears in print and online publications including Marin Poetry Center 2018 Anthology, The Bezine, Pudding Magazine, Is It Hot in Here Anthology, Persimmon Tree Magazine, and Poems of Political Protest: An Anthology, among others.
She has received prizes from the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition (2011-2014) and Mendocino Coast Writing Conference, and she has curated submissions to Bay Area Generations, monthly literary competition. Ellen serves as a prose reader for The MacGuffin literary journal.
ELISE KAZANJIAN (San Francisco, CA) is a poet and writer whose work has appeared in Fog & Light: San Francisco Through the Eyes of the Poets Who Live Here, New Millennium Writings, Minute Magazine, Marin Poetry Center Anthology; A Kind of Hurricane Press; Ararat Magazine, and others. Among her honors, she is a winner of the San Francisco Poets Eleven citywide contest, and The Chicagoland Poetry Contest. She has worked at Sunset Magazine, as the Foreign Editor of CCTV in Beijing, as the Administrator of August Coppola’s Audio Vision Project at San Francisco State University, and also as a pawnbroker. Her essays have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.
2021 Winners
- First Prize: Kathleen L. Meadows of El Cerrito, CA
“Waiting For The Rain”
- Second Prize: Lynda La Rocca of Salida, CO
- Third Prize: Sandra Anfang of Petaluma, CA