This year’s poetry contest was a huge success. We had about 200 entries from all of you and there were so many good ones that we had a very hard time narrowing them down. However, we did narrow them down and our judge has picked the 10 winners and 1 honorable mention. Among the winning poems there is a little something for every reader, as you will find poems about love and loss, city life, a rough day, playing on a sand dune, and even a poet who suspects his brother just might be a robot! 

We have a PDF available for download on the KDL Teen page with all the winners and their poems for your enjoyment. Take a minute to check them out, and join me in congratulating these wonderful poets!  If you entered and did not make the cut this year, I want to encourage you that there were many, many other poems that could have won and narrowly missed out. So keep writing and be ready for next year.

Also, a special thanks to our judge, David Cope. David is a creative writing professor at GRCC and a published poet. His expertise makes it possible for us to host this contest each year. In regards to this year’s winners, David wrote that they “were quite good, largely written in free verse that stuck to its subject and let the details speak for themselves.” His advice to those who didn’t make the cut is to avoid “rhymes that distort phrasing and often lead to grammatical inversions” because “rhyme is an ornament, not a necessity, and ‘either use no ornament or good ornament.’”

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Written by Josh

Josh is a Teen Services Librarian who loves that part of his job involves paying attention to comic books, pop culture, YA literature, movies, and video games. How great is that?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 8:20 am and is filed under Books & More, Events, News, Teens. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.