Poetry | Soft cover | 154 Pages | $15

Passager Poet Ginny Lowe Connors

and 58 Honorable Mentions

In college Ginny Lowe Connors made copies of favorite poems and secretly posted them in the restroom stalls in her dormitory, so that others would “discover” great poems. When she served as her town’s poet laureate, she initiated a project called Poetry in the Parks. Local writers of all ages and levels of experience wrote short poems; they selected some to print on wood-textured, weather resistant material, and mounted them on stands which area artists painted to enhance the poems. These poetry stands are now in two public parks so that, once again, people can “discover” a beautiful poem.

Read one of Connors’ contest-winning poems, “A Girl of Maiduguri,” below.

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Honorable Mentions

Julia Carter Aldrich
“Tell Me” [read, above]

Diana Anhalt
“¡Ilegal!”

Pat Anthony
“I Wore His Shirt the Other Day”

Charlie Becker
“Out West”

Bob Brussack
“I’m Good With It”

Christopher Buckley
“Looking Out the Window”

Elizabeth Burk
“At the Wake for My Ex-Husband’s Third Wife”

Johanna DeMay
“Flashbacks”

Linda Dove
“Fear as a Mullioned Window Inside a Rabbit’s Eye”

James Doyle
“Growing Up during World War II”

Frankie Drayus
“Still”

John Philip Drury
“Choosing a Reader”

Melanie DuBose
“Do I Need To Explain Forgetting”

C.W. Emerson
“Love & Bone”

Joanne Esser
“What the Lake Does to You”

Blair Ewing
“Earth Day: 1000 Times (or more) the Background Rate”

Katherine Fishburn
“Riding the UBC Bus”

Paul Fisher
“Another Day in Purgatory”

Max Gibson
“Falling Bodies”

J.M.R. Harrison
“Barns Are Painted Red Because of the Physics of Dying Stars”

Michael Harty
“Belated” [read, above]

Cheryl Heineman
“Allowing the Closeness”

Henry Hughes
“It Was a Gray Day”

Pat Hurley
“The Dead Must Be Exhausted” [read, above]

Janet Jenkins-Stotts
“KKKansas”

Elizabeth Keyser
“Cinderella” [read, above]

Jane Kimmey
“A Lesson in Simple Geometry”

Jane Kretschmann
“The Frackers”

Sigrun Susan Lane
“Light”

Rebecca Leet
“Ebb Tide”

Sandy Longley
“Present Tense”

Robert Lowes
“Wheat Penny” [read, above]

Fergus McAlister
“Not Afterwards the Words”

MaryAnn L. Miller
“Canaletto Validates My Grandmother”

Diana Morley
“Mark My Words”

Ruth Mota
“Women Cooking Chicken”

Jed Myers
“Name I’ve Never Heard”

Gail Newman
“The Bridge”

Sudie Nostrand
untitled

Ellen Grace O’Brian
“What To Do When You Cannot Love”

Barbara Paparazzo
“Innocent Radishes”

Scudder Parker
“Love of Justice”

John Peterson
“Scientific Dude”

Christopher Rubio-Goldsmith
“Safe Place”

Denise Rue
“The Language in Which I Love You”

Ellen Schmidt
“Oh say, did you know” [read, above]

Mike Schneider
“Largo”

Kit Sibert
“tomando aire”

Rose M. Smith
“When a Country Steals Your Sons”

Julie Cadwallader Staub
“Mallards”

Carol Sunde
“Mystics Claim Union with God Is Blue Light”

Christine Swint
“Singing at Sunrise on the Way”

Bonnie Thurston
“Lamentation”

Francine Walls
“fire, tooth, bone, earth”

Doris Watts
“Goodnight, Mr. Calabash, Wherever You Are”

Virginia Watts
“Don’t Swallow the Floodwater” [read, above]

Pamela Wynn
“Lay of the Land”

Susan Zannos
“Manifesto”


Mary Azrael, Kendra Kopelke, editors. Christine Drawl, managing editor. Pantea Amin Tofangchi, design.