For Immediate Release
April 17, 2001

SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. — Joining a 78-year tradition that includes such names as Sylvia Plath, Donald Hall, and James Merrill, student poets from Mount Holyoke College and five other colleges will compete in the Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Competition on Friday, April 20, at 8 PM in Gamble Auditorium.

The competition was started in 1923 in memory of poet Kathryn Irene Glascock, who died shortly after her graduation from the College the previous year. The Glascock Competition has launched the careers of some of the nation's most celebrated poets, including Sylvia Plath, Donald Hall, James Merrill, Kenneth Koch, Katha Pollitt, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg, all of whom were Glascock winners. The College's Mary Jo Salter, Emily Dickinson Lecturer in the Humanities, took second place in 1976.

Students are invited from an alternating roster of four to six colleges, with Mount Holyoke holding a permanent place in the contest. Kathryn Foran, a junior, will represent Mount Holyoke this year, competing against representatives of Amherst College, Bryn Mawr College, Emory University, Johns Hopkins University, and Smith College.

The contest has a history of attracting distinguished judges as well, including W. H. Auden, May Sarton, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, John Updike, Seamus Heaney, and many others. Carrying on that tradition are this year's judges: poets April Bernard, who received the Walt Whitman Award for her first book of poems, "Blackbird Bye Bye," in 1988; John Peck, a former teacher at the College who has written "Shagbark", "The Broken Blockhouse Wall", "M and Other Poems", and "Poems and Translations of Hi-Lo;" and Alastair Reid, a staff writer for the "New Yorker" who is also noted for his translations of Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges.

The contestants and the judges will meet at 3 PM on Friday, April 20, for an informal discussion in the Stimson Room of the Williston Library. At 8 PM, the students will read their work in Gamble Auditorium. The winner will be announced at 10:30 AM Saturday, April 21, in the New York Room of Mary Woolley Hall, where the judges will also read from their own work. All of the events are open to the public.

Aside from showcasing the work of talented student poets, the Glascock Competition serves as "an opportunity to have an eminent poet give a little time to your work," says Salter. "Here's an opportunity to meet with poets who are still producing, who serve as an example of what it means to be a working, publishing poet."

Salter says she well remembers details of what the judges said about her work 25 years ago, and what it meant to her to have their attention. "I didn't win, and it didn't matter," she says. "It made me feel that I had been taken seriously."

For the six contestants in this year's Glascock Competition, that opportunity — and perhaps more — lies ahead.

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