The Annual $5,550 Margaret Reid Poetry Prize for Traditional Verse is open! The annual $5,550 Tom Howard Short Story, Essay and Prose Contest is also open for entries! And also open, as of right now, is the annual $5,550 Tom Howard Poetry Contest for Verse in All Styles and Genres. To celebrate this occasion, an anthology of 98 poems by Tom Howard (including 75 previously unpublished) went on sale this morning at Amazon and other book stores. The website for the Tom Howard Poetry Contest is http://tomhowardpoetry.bravepages.com    

As promised, here is the full Winning and Commended List for the 2009 Margaret Reid Poetry Prize for Traditional Verse! The judges wish to extend their heartiest congratulations to ALL entrants who figure on this list:

First Prize $2,000: Judith Goldhaber: The Bewick's Wren

Second Prize $1,000: Samuel Tan: 10 p.m. by the Singapore River

Third Prize $500: Rosmarie Epaminondas-Bohm: Miss Worthington

Fourth Prize $250: Ellaraine Lockie: Coming  Home in a Haibun

5 High Distinction awards of $200 each (in order of merit): Carmine Dandrea: A Wake In The House

Elizabeth Davies: Time-Lapse Father—The Migrant Worker

Louis Giron: The Sleeper

Michael John Walsh: The Old Man from Malkala

Christine Hemp: All the Broken Toys

6 Most Highly Commended awards of $100 each (in order of merit): Judith Goldhaber: The Garden Spider

Paul Hamill: Day Sailing

Noble Collins: The Falcon

Debra Gundy: Reflections of Solitude

Alys Jackson: To Drift in Sandstone Folds

Jeanie Mercer: Haiku selections

Highly Commended (by number of entries Highly Commended): 

FIVE ENTRIES: Karen Winterburn, The Gift plus Endgame plus Lover Unknown plus Many Mansions plus Breaking Camp. 

FOUR ENTRIES: Tom Berman, Dark matter, dark energy plus On Viewing Comet Hale Hopp plus The Patterns of Chaos plus To every poet, his unicorn; Don Thackrey, Yellow Finch Reflection plus Tabby Toes plus The Relic in the Weeds plus Pa and the Misfits; Eve Burgum, Silver Beads of Ice plus Wishing on the Moon plus End of Summer Song plus The Barn Cat on the Prowl; Theresa D. Smith, Not Green, Everywhere plus A Peacock Villanelle plus The Dark Seemed to Make Room for Them plus Sestina. 

THREE ENTRIES: Lance Mason, My Sweater plus Views of the San Rafaels, April plus Tribute to Theodore; Kayleen Hazlehurst, Wild September Oranges plus From Liquid to Light plus Under the Ylang-Ylang Tree; Betty Leake, Tuscaloosa 1883 plus Death of an Owl plus Four Crows; Bernard Mann, A Jacobean Feast plus Beauty in the Burning plus Forested Hills Whisper; Elizabeth Davies, Sun-Warm Mangoes plus The Missing/Found Girls plus Morning Thunder; Louis Giron, The Sprinter plus Spring 2000, Lake Atitlan, Western Highlands, Gautemala plus No pottery this.  

TWO ENTRIES: Debra Gundy, Stir of Echoes plus The Written Word; Joseph Gorman: Sorrowful Mystery plus Harmless Doves and Hungry Owls; Diane Simkin, The Wait plus Garden of Remembrance; Patrick Walker, The Death Room plus An Old Score Settled; E.M. Schorb, Poetry in Motion plus The Bosnian Cherry; Louis Giron, The Sprinter plus Spring 2000, Lake Atitlan, Western Highlands, Gautemala; Michael Norris, Message from a Stowaway plus No Humdrum Conundrum; Tonni Riley, A Single Chard plus Like Water; Samuel Tan, To Chase the Threshold of Beauty plus Behind Guises; Gordon Leeder, Olga the Little Ostrich plus The Platypus; Paul F. Cummins, Vietnam Redux plus Under Cover; Christina Lovin, Trinity plus Fledge; Berwyn Moore, Tweezing the Bones plus Multiple Sclerosis; Michaela Norris, Coastlines plus Message from a Stowaway.

Anna Carlson, Escape from Reality; Jennifer Albina, Free from Strings; Lynnda Ell, Sunrise Symphony; Michelle Adserias, Why Is He Here?; Elizabeth Ferrari, Two Weeks; David Hann, The Ballad of Jake Brakes; Susan Holcomb, Empty Window; Casie Smith, Written in the Sand; Kogi Singh, Senses; Iris Fsher, Old Church; Cill Van Der Velden, Unity; Kate Tilley, A Vision Exquisite and Rare; Barry Freeman, Song of Tanzania; M. Higgs, Broken Wing; Karl Williams, In Matthew's Eyes; Meg McGrew, The Runner; Jeff Howe, What I Meant; Jeannie Mercer, Windows Old and New; Michael John Walsh, Call All the Winds; Ellaraine Lockie, Saying Goodbye; Noble Collins, Now That I Have the Time; Charlie Blake, Paradise Ditched; Judi Macomber, Trill; Alberta Fredricksen, I Am; Helen Bar-Lev, Down the River Jordan in a Rubber Dinghy; Ency Bearis, An Introspection Of A Poet; R.N. Peat, At The Turn; Philip E. Burnham, Jr., Waiting for the Red-winged Blackbirds; Kevin Hoidale, Wings; Amie Goodwin, Langston Hughes Rewrite; Veronica Hallissey, Subjective Journey; Jackie Cartel, The Raven; Martin Mahler, Veil of Night; Andrew Barber, Money God; Rob Wright, Four Photographs of Poets;  Jordan Reyne, Ghosts [Song 7 in "How the Dead Live"].

Commended (by number of entries Commended):

Four Poems: Vivian Franz, Acceptance plus Enlightenment plus Query plus Conspiracy; Sherwin Kaufman, The Child in Us plus A Child’s Vision plus Reverie plus Child’s Play.   

Three Poems: Robert (Bob) Patterson, A Book, With Pictures plus The Approaching Storm plus Going Home; Frank Salvidio, Magnets plus Calypso plus Canto V.

Two Poems: Helen Bar-Lev, Close to the Solstice plus Letter to a Distant Friend; Carmen Dandrea, A Fable of Flies plus Counting Out My Growth in Deaths; Janet Ireland Trail, The Bookshelf plus Learn from the Masters; Edgar H. Koch, Rondelet Septettes plus Harley Davidson’s Debut; Joan Blake, Brownian Motion or Science/Social; Moira France, The Clipper Ship plus Predator and Prey; Floyd E. “Skip” Hughes, In a Glass, Darkly plus Verweilen; Sean Arthur Joyce, Moth Evolution plus Conversations with Crow; Maria Tucciarone, Evocation plus Domination.      

Our previous anthologies of winning entries include SAILING IN THE MIST OF TIME: Award-Winning Poems. 

The latest Margaret Reid title is Love & City Dreaming: Poems by Margaret Havill Reid. Margaret's range and versatility in this book provide an excellent guide to the verse we are seeking for the Margaret Reid Prize. Margaret was a great champion of humorous verse, for example, illustrated in this book by delightful parodies like "The Wiz of Wizzinzee" and "Muzzacoffalox". She wrote serious poetry too, like "Face of the City", romantic verse such as "Loving You", spiritual verse ("His Light") , descriptive ("Nodding Among Geraniums"), political ("Myopia"), philosophical ("Was There a Silver Sea?"), reflective ("Time"), satirical ("Blinking into Day"), children's ("Mida, the Spider"), playful ("Superstar'), serious ("Raging Planet"), you-name-it ("The Hall of Mirrors").

Another book I recommend of course is my Write Ways to WIN WRITING CONTESTS: How To Join the Winners' Circle for Prose and Poetry Awards, If you've been wasting your time and money sending great stories or magnificent poems to Contests that immediately place them in the reject basket, you need to read this book.

This year, the prize pool for our prose and poetry contests have been increased to $5,550 (including a First Prize of $3,000). Entry fees will not be increased. The entry fee for the prose contest will remain at $15 for each short story or essay up to 5,000 words in length. There are ten cash prizes in all, but the judges do reserve the right to award extra cash prizes if they so desire. For the last prose contest, the judges awarded no less than $500 in additional prizes, bringing the total prize pool up to $5,850 instead of the advertised $5,350!

To enter your poems in our current poetry contests, you will find full information at http://margaretreid.exactpages.com OR http://poetrycontests.exactpages.com. You will note that although the prize-money has been increased, entry fees remain at $7 for every 25 lines. Unlike almost all other contests, we impose no limits on the number of lines or number of poems you may submit.

You can also visit the home page of http://www.winningwriters.com and click on the contests at the top left of the screen.

As stated above, the Tom Howard Short Story, Essay & Prose Contest is open. Entries will close on March 31, 2010. Again, let me make it clear at once that we are seeking entries in ALL categories, including "literary" fiction, but most particularly we would like to award prizes to popular, everyday, mainstream stories, essays and prose, as even a casual glance at our anthologies of winning and commended entries such as Keep Watching the Skies! An Anthology of Prize-Winning Short Stories will soon make plain.

You'll find full details at http://shortstorycontest.0catch.com

One of the key recommendations in my Write Ways to WIN WRITING CONTESTS is that you take a look at some of the entries that have won prizes in previous contests. This will give you some idea of the types and varieties of stories and prose pieces that have won prizes in the past. The book I recommend here is WATCHING TIME: Anthology of Prizewinning Essays & Short Stories

Amazon also stock two of our previous collections of winning prose, namely Keep Watching the Skies! An Anthology of Prize-Winning Short Stories as mentioned above, and Mr Christian and the Bag Lady: An Anthology of Prize-Winning Stories

And finally I notice Amazon are still selling the new, expanded edition of "Write Ways..." for only $11.25 (which is considerably less than the original edition, even though the new edition has more pages and lots more valuable information): Write Ways to WIN WRITING CONTESTS: How To Join the Winners' Circle for Prose and Poetry Awards, NEW EXPANDED EDITION

With all my very best wishes for your writing success in 2010!