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Sylvia Plath at Smith
Finalists
Elizabeth Bennett, Carly McIver, and Samantha Ardoin with prize judge
Tracy K. Smith in the Poetry Center (The winner, Haeyeon
Cho was home in Korea and unable to attend.)
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to the 2010-2011 competition
Winner:
Haeyeon Cho (Milton Academy),
for "The Soup
Kitchen"
Finalists:
Samantha Ardoin (Phillips
Exeter Academy), for "No Meaning
Intended"
Elizabeth
Bennett (Milton Academy), for "Race Days"
Carly McIver (Marblehead High
School), for "In Which a Past
Shows Visions of the Future and the Mallard Duck Regrets His Choice of
Living Quarters"
Semi-Finalists:
Sara Costello (Milton Academy), for "Pretty Little Thing"
Emily
Donaldson (Woodstock Union High School), for "Tactition"
Amelia
Fitch (Concord Academy), for "Necklace"
Julia Francis (Montpelier
High School), for "To Be Completely Honest"
Nicolette Gendron
(Milton Academy), for "Play Girl Play Life"
Alice Hale (Contoocook
Valley Regional High School), for "Crocus Vernus"
Lauren O'Donnell
(Falmouth High School), for "Apartment 5j"
Carolyn Orosz (Greater
Hartford Academy of the Arts), for "Obituary (or the things it should have
said)" |
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The award carried with it a prize of $500 for the first-place winner,
and the winners read their poems on stage at Tracy K. Smith's spring
poetry reading. Before the reading, the winner and runners-up are also
invited to meet privately with Tracy K. Smith, 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 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. Tracy K. Smith chose the winning poems from among twenty
finalists, selected anonymously by a committee of students and faculty.
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Tracy K. Smith
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Tracy K. Smith's poems treat grief and loss, historical
intersections with race and family, and the threshold between childhood
and adulthood, prompting Yusef Komunyakaa to write, "Here's a voice that
can weave beauty and terror into one breath." Joy Harjo has called her
work "a true merging of the ancient roots of poetry with the language of
an age of a different kind of sense." Author of two collections, The
Body's Question and Duende, and recipient of many honors, Smith
teaches creative writing at Princeton.
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