Summer Poetry Contest, 2023

We would like to offer a cash prize of $250, $150, and $100 and publication in Issue 2 of The Tomahawk Creek Review to the the top three finalists of our Summer Poetry Contest, which will begin at 12:00 p.m., June 23 and end at 12:00 a.m., July 15. It will be judged by Richard Strier, Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the English Department, the Divinity School, and the College of the University of Chicago.

The entry fee is 8$. The theme is open. Entries may consist of up to three poems, of which one would be selected. Each poem must be no longer than 30 lines. Please use 12 pt Times New Roman font, single-space, and save your entry in one MS Word document, in .doc or .docx format. Best of luck to you!

Please click here to submit.

Richard Strier was educated at The City College of New York (CCNY), where he won various poetry contests and edited the prize-winning literary magazine, Promethean; and then at Harvard University, where he did his Ph.D. He has published poetry in Promethean, in The World: A New York Literary Magazine, and in The Chicago Review. His entire teaching career has been at the University of Chicago (1973), aside from a year as a visitor at Brandeis University. He has actively taught in the Humanities Core program at U of Chicago, and has regularly taught poetry workshops, Renaissance poetry and drama (primarily Shakespeare), Milton, Renaissance intellectual history, and literary theory at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He has directed over 40 Ph.D. dissertations, many of them on poetry. Strier’s published work, like his teaching, brings together two approaches to literature that (he has argued) have been needlessly separated and seen as antagonistic: formalism (“close reading”) and historicism. His first book, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (1983; paper, 1986) has been influential both in determining Herbert’s theology and in providing readings of individual poems; his second book, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (1995; paper 1997), was a protest in the name of non-schematic reading against approaches to texts that know in advance what they must say or do; his next book, The Unrepentant Renaissance from Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (2011) continues the argument against knowing in advance, here focusing on opposing the historical framework that would see the Renaissance as dark and repressive. It received the Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award for Literary Criticism. Shakespearean Issues: Agency, Skepticism, and other Puzzles came out in the spring of 2023. Strier also believes in collaborative and interdisciplinary scholarship, as can be seen in the collections of essays he has co-edited with historians as well as literary scholars (most recently, one on Shakespeare and Law, co-edited with another English professor and a faculty member in Law and Philosophy). He sees his scholarship, his teaching, and his collaboration with other scholars as all part of the same endeavor.

*Photo by Mike Gosalia