Once again in 2024, students are invited to enter a youth poetry contest sponsored by The Westport Garden Club, the Westport Arts Advisory Committee, Town Poet Laureate Jessica Noyes McEntee, and The Westport Library.
The contest is affiliated with the National Garden Club’s Youth Poetry Contest and enables youth to embrace their creativity through the art of writing.
The theme for the 2024 competition is: “I Spy With My Little Eye, Something Green Outside – Celebrating Our Green World.”
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Who Can Enter:
- Students in kindergarten through ninth grade.
- Including public and private schools, home-schooled students, special education, English as a Second Language, and general education students.
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Guidelines for Entries:
- All entries must be typed and titled.
- Include the participant's name, address, age, grade, and school on the back of the entry and the preferred email address for correspondence.
- All entries become the property of National Garden Clubs, Inc.
- Poems do not have to rhyme.
- Poems may be traditional verse, acrostics, blank verse, cinquains, diamond poems, limericks, or Haiku.
- The theme should not be used as the title of any poetry. (When judging, the title is worth 10 points.)
- Poems should be submitted by email to: [email protected] by January 5, 2024.
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Scale of Points
Title: 10%
Content: 40%
Creativity: 30%
Style: 20%
Total: 100%
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Entries are due by January 5. The poems selected by a jury committee will then be submitted to the regional organization, New England Garden Clubs, for another round of judging. The region's final selections will then be submitted for National Garden Club Awards, where winning entries will be compiled into a booklet and made available to the winners.
Locally, poets will be invited to read from their work at a library event, open to the public to celebrate poetry in April 2024.
To view the 2023 winning entries, including local Westporter Owen Cloherty, click here.
