English Department

Deadline for submissions: March 1, 2018

The Gildart Writing Prizes honor Robert H. Gildart, professor of creative writing at Albion College for 25 years.  These are cash awards for college sophomores in the categories of poetry, fiction, and drama. Up to three awards in each category are awarded every year. If you’re a sophomore, we invite you to submit your work for consideration! For the purposes of this contest, sophomores are Albion College students who entered as first-year students in 2016 or who are transfer students with sophomore standing.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions for each category may contain more than one work but should not exceed 15 pages in total length (25 pages for drama).  Entries that contain more than one work in a category will be judged as a whole.

Each entry should have a title page that includes the following information:

(1) Gildart Prize Contest of 2018,

(2) your name,

(3) your student number,

(4) the first line of the entry, and

(5) your KC Box #.

Your name should not appear within the poetry, fiction or drama work you are submitting.   Please paperclip the title page(s) to each piece you submit.

Entries are due in the English Office (406 Vulgamore Hall) @ 12:00 pm (noon) on Thursday, March 1, 2018

Who: All Albion College students who entered as first-year students in 2014 and transfer students with sophomore standing. What: A gift to the English department made possible the creation of the Robert H. Gildart Writing Prizes. These are cash prizes designed to honor the career of Bob Gildart, who taught at Albion College for 25 years and cared deeply about the quality of student writing. The prizes will be awarded each year to sophomores at Albion College. Up to three awards in each category will be made this year, and this notice is an invitation to all sophomores to submit their work for consideration. How: You may submit original works in one or more of the following categories: poetry, fiction, drama. Submissions for each category may contain more than one work but should not exceed 15 pages in total length (25 pages for drama). Entries that contain more than one work in a category will be judged as a whole.

Important Information: To be considered for a Gildart Prize, bring your entry to the English Office (406 Vulgamore Hall) by 12:00 PM (noon) on Thursday, March 3, 2016. Each entry should have a title page that includes the following: (1) The Gildart Prize Contest of 2016, (2) your name, (3) your student number, (4) the first line of the entry, and your KC Box #.

Note: Your name should not appear within the poetry, fiction or drama work you are submitting.  Please paper clip the title page(s) to each piece you submit.

Good Luck! We look forward to reviewing–and rewarding– some excellent student writing.

[Cross posted from Ian MacInnes’ blog, Free Range Teaching]

As we leave April behind, I find myself reflecting on the Charles Crupi Memorial poetry competition, which I have judged now for many years. It is perhaps the only state-wide poetry competition open to Michigan high school students, and it produces a LOT of poetry. This year we had more than 1200 contestants. My job is to read all the poems and narrow them down to 100 or so for our final judges. As you might imagine, the experience of reading all these poems is daunting, even exhausting, but I always find it strangely uplifting. It’s not just the occasional brilliant poem that makes it worthwhile. It’s the sum total of all that young poetic expression. Of course, not everything we get is actually a poem. Occasionally someone will even submit a photograph, and we get a few prose passages from essays and quite a bit of “if it rhymes it must be poetry.” And every year we get at least one poem called “I’m only writing this poem for extra credit,” a title that could lead to a deliciously ironic award winning poem, were it not always so true. But overall our high school students are deeply sincere, and for me sincerity has the power to elevate even the humblest poem. Lines such as “Please dear Lord have pity / Don’t take my kitty”(1) may not be part of a winning entry, but you can’t deny their touching authenticity.

It’s impossible to read 1200 poems without realizing that they fall into definite genres. Some are traditional to lyric poetry like the “I’m sorry you’re dead” poems or the “Do you love me?” poems (2). These can be either wonderful or awful, but either way they show that these young writers know something of the work that poetry can do in the world. Even teen angst is oddly touching. These are the endless poems about the corruption of the world or the “when-you-said-you-loved-me-you-were-lying” poems. Their cynicism is happily false. Those who are truly jaded by “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” no longer see them as a subject for poetry. Our contestants, on the other hand, like Hamlet, still have the grace to be appalled by the world. The other aspect of the competition that gives me faith in the future is the love of language that runs through the entries like gold, emerging here and there in brilliant seams and nuggets. Most of all this reminds me of the gifted high school teachers who stand behind many of these young poets. Michigan owes these teachers a debt of gratitude. They are the ones who are teaching our children the power of poetry to imagine the world anew.

(1) Loosely remembered from an entry some years ago.
(2) I attribute these phrases to Harvard scholar Helen Vendler, from a public lecture long ago.

Monica McFawn

Monica McFawn lives in Michigan and teaches writing at Grand Valley State University. Her fiction has appeared in the Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Web Conjunctions, Missouri Review, and others.  Her collection of short stories, Bright Shards of Someplace Else, won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. She is also the author of a hybrid chapbook, A Catalogue of Rare Movements, and her plays and screenplays have had readings in Chicago and New York.

The reading takes place on Thursday, February 5, 2015, at 5:00 p.m. in the Wendell Will Room. Albion College Reading Series events are free and open to the public. Learn more about the Albion College Reading Series by visiting the Albion College Reading Series page.