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Seneca Park Zoo’s Nature Poetry contests are community-based explorations of the connections we have with nature. Our theme for 2024 is “Water Into Words,” taking inspiration from water, bodies of water, waterways, rain, or water in any form that inspires you, as water is the lifeblood of nature. Submissions of poems by writers of all ages and backgrounds, referencing water in some way and grounded in an ethos of conservation were submitted. Winners have been announced and appear below with selections of honorable mentions in each category.
Youth: Ages 12 and under
Teen: Ages 13 – 18
Emerging Adult Writer: Unpublished poets, ages 19 and above (self-published writers may select this category)
Published Adult Writer: Poets published in print and/or online, ages 19 and above
Up to three Honorable Mentions in each category receive:
One Winner in each category receives all Honorable Mention benefits stipulated, plus:
The Winner of the Adult – Published category will receive:
April 22, 2024 – Submissions open
August 16, 2024 – Submission period closes
Unpublished, original poems written in English or Spanish, in any style, including prose poems and song lyrics.
Simultaneous submission to other competitions should be noted: immediate notice upon winning such a competition is required.
At the top of the first page, please include the category in which you are submitting (Youth, Teen, Emerging Adult or Published Adult).
Title of the poem and the category should appear in the upper-right corner of each page.
Format poems in 12-point font size, Calibri, Arial, or Times New Roman font, as .doc or .docs or .pdf
Poems with more than 500 words will not be reviewed.
1. One poem per poet.
2. Poem must be submitter’s original work, unpublished in print or online.
3. Maximum length: 500 words.
4. Poem must reference water or a body of water in some way.
5. Format poems in 12-point font size, Calibri, Arial, or Times New Roman font, as .doc, .docx., or .pdf
6. Paginate when poems exceed one page.
7. No illustrations.
8. Online submissions only via this webpage’s upload instructions
9. Title of the poem and the category should appear in the upper-right corner of each page.
10. Poet’s name and contact information may not appear on the submitted document.
11. Poems may not be edited or re-submitted.
12. Winners will be notified in September 2024.
Current or former colleagues, employees, family members and close friends of the judges; and current or former employees and members of the board of Seneca Park Zoo Society or Writers & Books are ineligible.
If any of the selected Winners or Honorable Mentions fall under the above exclusions, they will be disqualified and a replacement chosen from among the finalists. As the poetry community is small and the contest is judged without knowledge of the submitter’s identity, mere acquaintance with the judges or participation in a workshop taught by them are not disqualifying criteria.
Every eligible poem is scored by a panel of reviewers, whose cumulative rankings establish the top ten poems in each category. The top ten scoring poems are reviewed by the judges to determine the winner and honorable mentions in their category.
Category Judges are experienced literary arts practitioners, including poets, authors, educators, librarians, arts administrators, and other relevant professionals. We are honored they contributed their time and talent to ensuring the highest standards for Water Into Words.
Born and raised in Milledgeville, Georgia, Sean Hill is the author of two poetry collections, Dangerous Goods, awarded the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, (Milkweed Editions, 2014) and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, named one of the Ten Books All Georgians Should Read in 2015 by the Georgia Center for the Book, (UGA Press, 2008).
Hill’s poems and essays have appeared in Callaloo, Harvard Review, New England Review, Orion, Oxford American, Poetry, Tin House, and numerous other journals, and in nearly three dozen anthologies including Black Nature and Villanelles. His poems have also been featured as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series and on The Slowdown podcast when hosted by former U.S. Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith.
Hill has served as the director of the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference at Bemidji State University since 2012. Hill lives with his family in southwest Montana and is an Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana.
Alison Meyers is Executive Director of Writers & Books, a literary arts center in Rochester, NY. A veteran nonprofit leader, she previously led Cave Canem Foundation (Brooklyn, NY) as Executive Director, 2006-2016; served at Hill-Stead Museum (Farmington, CT) as Poetry Director and Director of Marketing & Communications, 2000-2006; and was General Manager of the Oberlin (OH) Consumers Co-op, a $2.9 million bookstore serving Oberlin College & Conservatory and surrounding communities (1995-1999).
For many years she owned and managed an independent bookstore in Connecticut. She consults, sits on panels, and presents widely; serves as a LitNYS mentor for New York State-based literary arts nonprofits; and is Treasurer of the Board of Kweli Journal. Alison is a Pushcart Prize‐nominated poet, fiction writer, and essayist whose work may be found in journals and anthologies and at www.alisonmeyers.com.
Tyler Barton is the author of Eternal Night at the Nature Museum (Sarabande) and The Quiet Part Loud (Split/Lip). His work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. His poem, “Strange Past Universe, Stone” was a winner of the Seneca Park Zoo’s 2023 “Poetry Takes Wing” competition. He serves as the program manager for the Adirondack Center for Writing where he leads writing workshops for the incarcerated elderly. Learn more at tsbarton.com or follow him @tylerbartonlol.
A 2022 MacArthur Genius Fellow, Dr. J. Drew Lanham is a conservation ornithologist and endowed faculty at Clemson University, where his work focuses on the intersections among race, place, and nature. He is the author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts, and and author of the forthcoming children’s book The Bird I Became” from Enchanted Lion Books.
His creative work and opinion appears in Orion, Vanity Fair, High Country News, Bitter Southerner, Terrain, Places Journal, Literary Hub, Newsweek, Slate, NPR, Story Corps, On Being, Audubon, Sierra Magazine, and The New York Times, among others. Dr. Lanham is the winner of the Dan W. Lufkin Conservation Award (National Audubon Society), Rosa Parks and Grace Lee Boggs Outstanding Service Award (North American Association for Environmental Education) and the E.O. Wilson Award for Outstanding Science in Biodiversity Conservation (Center for Biological Diversity).
Finalist reviewers are experienced literary arts practitioners, including poets, authors, educators, librarians, arts administrators, and other relevant professionals. We are honored they contributed their time and talent to ensuring the highest standards for Water Into Words.
Anne Marie Wells
Anne Marie Wells (She | They) is the author of Survived By: A Memoir in Verse + Other Poems (Curious Corvid Publishing, 2023), the inaugural winner of the Wanderlust Travel Book Award for her memoir, Happy Iceland, through Wild Dog Press (pending publication), and the 2023 winner of the Cinnamon Press Chapbook Contest for her collection, Mother, (v). She won the 2023 Maryland Writers Association Poetry Contest, the 2023 Jackson Hole Poetry Box Contest, 2023 DC Public Library Haiku Contest, was long-listed for the International Erbacce Prize in Poetry, and was short-listed for the inaugural Emma Howell Rising Poet Award. She was the winner of the 2021 Crow House Press Poetry Competition, earned the 2021 Peter K. Hixson Memorial award in poetry presented by Writer’s Relief, and was a 2021 Wyoming Woman of Influence nominee in the arts category for amplifying the voices of the LGBTQ and disabled communities through her writing. She is the lead faculty for the DC Chapter of the Community Literature Initiative poetry publishing program through the Sims Library of Poetry and strategic partnership fellow for The Poetry Lab.
Richard Moss
Richard Moss worked at the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle for 32 years, rising from copy editor to news director, and spent a couple of additional years at the Rochester Business Journal. He is devoting part of his retirement toward a quixotic attempt to extract the perfect haiku from what remain of his brain cells.
Thomas Thomas
Thomas A. Thomas lives along the Salish Sea outside Olympia, WA. His writing and photography are deeply concerned with the watery and forested worlds he walks and paddles through. Individual works appear most recently in Gyroscope Review, Blue Heron Review, Cirque Journal, Vox Populi Sphere, The Banyan Review, FemAsiaMagazine
Celeste Schantz
Celeste Schantz was a co-winner of the 2023 Poetry Takes Wing contest, sponsored by the Seneca Park Zoo and Writers and Books. She was the runner-up for the 2018 Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry, judged by Terrance Hayes. She has studied with the writers Marge Piercy and Kim Addonizio. In addition Celeste has written creative nonfiction. She was a 2021 finalist for Lighthouse Lit Fest, to study creative nonfiction with essayist Leslie Jamison. In 2020 her micro-essay “Strata” was selected out of 600 for publication on PBS’s Next Avenue. In 2019 Celeste was awarded a full scholarship from the Katherine Bakeless Nason Endowment to study nature writing with Helen Macdonald at the Bread Loaf Environmental Writing Conference. She was a finalist in Fugue journal’s 2018 annual prose writing contest. Her essay “Lake Under the Sea” appears in Fugue.
For five years Celeste also published a literary journal from her kitchen table, called Mason Street Review. During that time, she solicited and published work by Juan Felipe Herrera, David Baldacci, Lois Lowry and others. Celeste lives behind a dairy farm in Western New York where she works as her son’s home health aide.
David Taylor
David Taylor is an Associate Professor and Faculty Director of the Environmental Humanities Major in the Sustainability Studies Program in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University. His writing crosses disciplinary boundaries and genres—poetry, creative nonfiction, scholarship, and science writing; however, at the core of his work always is a concern for environmental sustainability and community. David is the author and editor of eight books.
Maureen Whalen
Maureen Whalen has been a docent at the Seneca Park Zoo since 2006 and can usually be found talking with guests at the Rocky Coasts. She is also the zoo historian; in April 2020, she published her book, A History of Seneca Park Zoo. After retiring as a librarian for Rochester Public Library, Maureen has pursued her interest in local history as a volunteer at the Greece Historical Society and curated a number of their exhibits. In 2019 she was awarded the Greece Regional Chamber of Commerce History Award.
Joanne Brokaw
Author, performer, and teaching artist Joanne Brokaw has helped countless people discover their inner artist by encouraging them to take creative risks, celebrate mistakes, and focus on the process, not the product. With a contagious passion for creativity and a gift for inspiring others, Joanne encourages people of all ages to discover the joy of self-expression.
Jason Overton
Jason Overton lives in Nashville, TN and graduated from Emory University with an International Studies degree. He works as a global account manager for a cross-cultural training company and self-produced two albums as a songwriter in 2006 and 2009 while living in San Francisco. In 2023, he won a “Poetry Takes Wing” adult emerging poet contest co-sponsored by Writers & Books and Seneca Park Zoo. In his free time, he enjoys tennis, golf, yoga, and reading/ writing poetry.
Annette Ramos
Originally, from New York City by way of Los Angeles, Annette Ramos is now a Rochester-based Latinx leader, community advocate and Cultural curator with collaboration at the heart of her leadership process. Annette has over 35 years of work as a Teaching Artist, Master Storyteller and Community Activist across the USA, and in multiple school districts, conferences and festivals. She now serves as cofounder, producer, director & playwright for dozens of Latinx productions in the role of Executive Director for the Rochester Latino Theatre Company founded in 2011. She continues to lead through her civic engagement as the Co-chair of the City of Rochester’s AC3 Arts Commission and at the County level in voter registration for the Board of Elections.
Thank you to Writers & Books for helping make this event possible!
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