to the 2012-2013 competition

Congratulations to our prize-winners!

Winner:

Helena Ainsworth from Newburyport High School, Newburyport, MA
for "Space Cadet Noggin Socket Helmet"

Finalists:

Annalise Cain from Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Public Charter School, South Hadley, MA
for "Porky the Papa"

Deja Carr from Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Public Charter School, South Hadley, MA
for "John Deere and Aunt Jemima"

Nadia Gribkova from Westover School, Middlebury, CT
for "Daybreak"

This year's judge, Aracelis Girmay, will meet with the winner and finalists and they read their poems at the start of her reading at Smith College on April 9, 2013.

Semi-Finalists 2013:

Congratulations also to these semifinalists, whose work stood out from the large number of entries:

Isabelle Doyle from Emma Willard School, Troy, NY
for "I've Come Undone"

Lilian Kong from Wheeler School, Providence, RI
for "doodle"

Fiora Elbers-Tibbetts from Walnut Hill School for the Arts, Natick, MA
for "Drinks of Envy"

Kira Hunter from Westover School, Middlebury, CT
for "Young"

Jesse Saffeir from Merriconeag Waldorf School, New Gloucester, ME
for "What the Flames Saw"

Mia Wurgaft from Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Public Charter School, South Hadley, MA
for "Welcome home."

Lindsay Matheos from the Derryfield School, Manchester, NH
for "Second First Impressions"

Sydney Adedamola from Milton Academy, Milton, MA
for "Harvest"

Natalia Gutierrez from The Loomis Chaffee School, Windsor, CT
for "Las Raices"

Olivia Burns from Westover School, Middlebury, CT
for "Rehoboth (for Mary Oliver)"

Faolain Bobersky from Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Public Charter School, South Hadley, MA
for "Six Ways to Look at Shoes"

Eleanor Levine from Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Public Charter School, South Hadley, MA
for "In the pixilated nighttime"

Judge for 2013: Aracelis Girmay

Read the Winning Poems here!

The award carried with it a prize of $500 for the first-place winner, and the winners read their poems on stage at Aracelis Girmay's spring poetry reading. Before the reading, the winner and runners-up are also invited to meet privately with Aracelis Girmay, and to spend an afternoon at Smith, visiting the Poetry Center.

The Smith College Poetry Prize for High School Girls is a regionwide contest open to sophomore and junior girls. Submissions were received from all parts of New England, and from public, private and home-schooled students. Aracelis Girmay chose the winning poems from among twenty finalists, selected anonymously by a committee of students and faculty.

About the Judge:

Aracelis Girmay's poems move with grace between prayerfulness, defiance, heartache, and mischief. Her first book of poems, Teeth, draws from her many lineages - Eritrean, Puerto Rican, African American - and joins them in a distinct voice that Martín Espada calls "brave, lyrical, fiery, joyful." Her stunning most recent collection, Kingdom Animalia, won the Isabella Gardner Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle, who called Girmay "an American original."

View the 2012 winners

View the 2011 winners

View the 2010 winners

View the 2009 winners

View the 2008 winners

View the 2007 winners

From Sylvia Plath's journal, Smith College, April 27, 1953