New Contest: Calling All Poets!

Pix-N-Pens is very thrilled to welcome our special guest judge this week - she's truly an answer to prayer. I've had several requests for poetry contests, and am not qualified to judge poetry, so I began praying for the Lord to send us a poet. And He did!

This contest will be a bit different than any we've had before, so please make sure you read and understand all of the instructions before submitting.

First, please allow me to introduce our judge, Laura Evans.

Laura Evans grew up in the United States, adopted by American parents. She speaks only English. She hopes to remedy that situation some day. Meanwhile, she works at checking off more entries on her to-read booklist which seems to grow longer--not shorter.

She has more than 15 years of writing and teaching experience. She graduated summa cum laude with a BS in English literature. She completed a 12-week online poetry class through Writer's Digest taught by Prof. Stephen Perry from UCLA. She has also attended a poetry workshop at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.

More than 56 poems have been published in various literary and popular journals including:

Canadian Writer’s Journal

Modern Haiku

Highlights

High Five

Lilliput

Frogpond

Psychopoetica

Northwest Literary Forum

Piedmont Literary Review

Nebraska Life Magazine

She is a member of:

The Academy of American Poets

The Christian PEN: Proofreaders and Editors Network

Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators

Christian Writers Group International

The Writers View, an online group of professional Christian writers, editors, and agents.

You can learn more about Laura at her Web site: http://www.redeemingwords.com/

The winner of our contest this week will receive this beautiful tatted bookmark, handmade by our guest judge. When I asked, Laura said it took 5-6 hours to make.

Tatting is an ancient form of lacemaking. Queen Victoria made it very popular when she took up tatting in the late 1800s. Women held tatting bees where gossip was prohibited. Only the Bible or poetry was read.

Here are the specifics for this contest:

Poetry Contest - any theme

Submit your poem(s) in the body of an email to tracyruckman [at] gmail [dot] com

Please limit your poems to 25 lines or fewer. You may submit up to two poems on any subject. When sending your poem by e-mail, make sure the formatting is the way you expect it to be. (i.e. are the line breaks correct, are the double spaces where they are supposed to be, are the line indentations correct, etc.) Be sure to include your full name, and a brief bio when you submit your entry. (the bio will be posted if you win)

The poems will be judged blindly, so before our guest judge reads them, all names and bios will be removed from the entries. I will post the entries anonymously online, so everyone can read them, but all comments will be turned off during the duration of the contest, so no one can identify the author. At the end of the contest, I will turn the comments back on, so everyone can comment on their favorites.

The deadline is this Friday, June 20th, so get writing!