2025 Knoxville Writers Guild Poetry Contest

The Knoxville Writers Guild is accepting submissions during February for its annual poetry contest in adult and young adult categories. Submissions must be received electronically by 11:59 p.m. on February 28, 2025. First prize is $300 and second prize is $100. Each category first prize winner will read at the April KWG meeting — A Celebration of Poetry. Guild members benefit from one free submission. For submission guidelines and to submit, click here!

Judge:

Thanks to Professor Cornelius Eady for generously agreeing to be our judge for the contest.

Professor/Poet/Playwright/Songwriter and Cave Canem Co-Founder Cornelius Eady was born in Rochester, NY in 1954, and is Professor of English and John C. Hodges Chair of Excellence at the University of Tenn. Knoxville. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; Brutal Imagination, and Hardheaded Weather. He wrote the libretto to Diedra Murray’s opera Running Man, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Theatre in 1999, and his verse play Brutal Imagination won the Oppenheimer Prize in 2001. Eady’s pandemic folk song project Don’t Get Dead, recorded with his Trio, was released in 2021 by June Appal Recording. His work and songs has been featured on NPR, BBC Radio 4 and the PBS Newshour. His awards include Fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and Lifetime Achievement Awards in Poetry from The Poetry Foundation, The National Book Foundation, Brooklyn Poets, Poets and Writers Foundation, Furious Flower Foundation and the Lannan Foundation.

Equal Opportunity: The Knoxville Writers Guild does not discriminate against any person because of race, age, gender, disability, or national origin.