Entry deadline: May 15
Poem and critiques posted: June

Submit your poem to The Writer's Online Poetry Spotlight. Poets Kay Day, Shoshauna Shy, Patricia Gray and David Wright will critique selected poems.

Poets are invited to submit a poem for The Writer's Online Poetry Spotlight. One poem per spotlight session will be selected for expert critique by several award-winning poets. Each session will be online for about one month. The critique will include suggestions as well as comments citing the poem's strengths. Guest poets will address form, poetic devices, sound, sensory elements and style, and will offer purely constructive comments.

You do not have to be a Writer subscriber to submit a poem.

If your entry is selected for critique, you will receive a one-year subscription to The Writer. The best Spotlight poem posted on The Writer Web site in 2006 will receive $100.

The winning poem and critiques will be posted in the Poetry Spotlight forum in the premium subscriber forum area at www.writermag.com in June.

Guidelines:

• Put "Poetry Spotlight 2 Entry" in the subject field and send your poem to poetryspotlight@writermag.com by May 15.
  


• Include your name, address and phone number in the body of the e-mail.


• Submit your poem in the body of the e-mail.


• Poems must be single-spaced, with a blank line between stanzas. Please type in 10- or 12-pt. Times, New Roman or Arial. Unless your poem has unique spacing, please set each line at the left margin.


• Only poems that follow these guidelines will be considered.

The Writer's Online Poetry Spotlight is moderated by award-winning poet Kay Day.

Subscribers to The Writer are invited to post their constructive comments in the Poetry Spotlight Community Comments thread in the Poetry Spotlight forum.

PARTICIPANTS
Facilitator/moderator
Kay Day
Kay Day moderated poetry at the Alsop Review forum The Gazebo, one of the oldest, most respected workshops on the Internet. Winner of a number of awards for poetry, Day speaks about poetry and creative writing to audiences around the country. She is the author of two collections of poetry and a memoir. Her book A Poetry Break won top prize for poetry from the Florida Writers' Association, and was the only Florida poetry title nominated by the Southeastern Booksellers Association for poetry book of the year. A new poetry collection is forthcoming in 2007. Web: www.kayday.net.

Guest poets
Shoshauna Shy
Shoshauna Shy is a member of the Prairie Fire Poetry Quartet, the founder of BookThatPoet.com and of the Poetry Jumps Off the Shelf program. Her poems have received awards from the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, ByLine magazine and The Rockford Review and have been published in numerous journals, including Poetry Northwest, Cimarron Review, The Comstock Review and Rosebud. One of her poems was selected for the Poetry 180 Library of Congress program launched by Billy Collins and subsequently anthologized by Random House. Three collections of her poetry have been released by Moon Journal Press, Pudding House Publications and Parallel Press, an imprint of the University of Wisconsin-Madison library system. Shy works for the Wisconsin Humanities Council. Web: www.BookThatPoet.com/poets/shyshosh.html.

Patricia Gray
Patricia Gray's collection Rupture was chosen by Montserrat Review as one of the best books of poetry for 2005. In February, the author was a reader and panelist at the South Carolina Book Festival in Columbia, and in September she was an author/panelist at the Southern Women Writers Conference at Berry College in Georgia. She has also been awarded a 2006 Artist's Fellowship from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Patricia Gray also coordinates the Poetry at Noon reading series at the Library of Congress. Her work is widely published in literary journals and magazines. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia and won the Academy of American Poets prize. Web: www.redhen.org/bookDetail.asp?bookID=92.

David Wright
David Wright's most recent poetry collection is A Liturgy for Stones. His work has appeared in Poetry East, Artful Dodge and The Mars Hill Review, among others. The anthology A Cappella Mennonite Voices in Poetry also includes a selection of his poems. A native of Central Illinois, where he resides with his family, he is a past recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Artist's Fellowship for poetry.

Employees of The Writer (and its affiliates) and their family members are not eligible to participate in the Online Poetry Spotlight.

Previous Poetry Spotlights