Announcing the Bards on the Bus Contest!
In honor of National Poetry Month, The Carolina Quarterly is launching a campaign to recognize the poetic talents in Orange County, North Carolina, during the month of April.
Send us your most creative ballads, haikus, sestinas, sonnets, villanelles, ghazals, prose poems, or free verse compositions by March 26th for consideration. Poems must be no longer than 30 lines. We will accept up to 4 poems per person.
Up to ten of the best pieces will be featured on Chapel Hill Transit buses throughout the month of April. One grand prize winner will receive $50. The winner and all honorable mentions will get a one-year subscription to The Carolina Quarterly.
To submit, please email your poems in a single attachement to carolina.quarterly@gmail.com. Please write “Bards on the Bus” in the subject line.
The contest is free and open to all students at UNC-Chapel Hill and residents of Orange County, North Carolina.
Contest judge: Michael Chitwood
Michael Chitwood is a free-lance writer and a lecturer at the University of North Carolina. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Poetry, The New Republic, Threepenny Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Field, The Georgia Review and numerous other journals. Ohio Review Books has published two books of his poetry – Salt Works (1992) and Whet (1995). His third book, The Weave Room, was published by The University of Chicago Press in the Phoenix Poets series (1998). His collection of essays, Hitting Below the Bible Belt, was published by Down Home Press in 1998. Gospel Road Going, a collection of poems about his native Appalachia, was published in 2002 and was awarded the 2003 Roanoke-Chowan Prize for Poetry. In 2006, he published a collection of essays and short stories called Finishing Touches. His collection of poetry From Whence was released in March 2007 from Louisiana State University Press. Tupelo Press published his book Spill in October of 2007. Spill was named as a finalist for ForeWard magazine’s poetry book of the year.
