Winner:
Maia ten Brink of Falmouth (Falmouth Academy)
for her poem “renunciation”

Finalists:

Sarah Fitzgibbons, from South Deerfield
(Frontier Regional High School)
for her poem "This Millennium’s List"

Rebekah-Shireen Lefebvre, from Hadley
(Hopkins Academy)
for her poem "Meeting"

Sadie McCarney, from New Glasgow, Nova Scotia
(Walnut Hill School, Natick)
for her poem "Swimming Pool"

Judge for 2008: Sharon Olds

Read the Winning Poems here!

The award carries with it a prize of $500 for the first-place winner, and the winners will read their poems on stage at Ms. Olds’ spring poetry reading, on Tuesday, April 8. Before the reading, the winner and runners-up are also invited to meet privately with Ms. Olds, and to spend an afternoon at Smith, visiting the Poetry Center and meeting with President Christ.

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

Author of eight volumes of poetry, Sharon Olds has been much praised for the courage, emotional power, and extraordinary physicality of her work. She is the recipient of many distinguished honors, including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Lamont Poetry Selection, and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Olds teaches graduate poetry workshops at N.Y.U. as well as the writing workshop she helped found at a 900-bed state hospital for the severely disabled.

View the 2007 winners

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