South Hadley, MA---Joining a 80-year tradition that boasts such past participants 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 25, at 8 PM in Gamble Auditorium at Mount Holyoke College.

This year, Mount Holyoke senior Olivia Bustion will join student poets from Amherst College, Connecticut College, Cornell University, George Washington University, and Haverford College in a public reading Friday, April 25 at 8 pm in Gamble Auditorium and will be judged by acclaimed poets Wyatt Prunty, Rhina Espaillat, and Rachel Wetzsteon. The poet-judges will announce the 2003 Glascock winner after a reading of their own work on Saturday, April 26 at 10:30 am in the library's Stimson Room. They will also participate in a "Life and Letters" conversation Friday at 3 pm in the Stimson Room. All events are free and open to the public.

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. Since its inception, the Kathryn Irene Glascock Poetry Prize Contest has been bringing aspiring undergraduate poets into contact with established poets, as well as launching the careers of some of the twentieth century's most celebrated poets, including Sylvia Plath, Donald Hall, James Merrill, Kenneth Koch, Katha Pollitt, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg, MHC '75, all of whom were Glascock winners. The College's Mary Jo Salter, Emily Dickinson Lecturer in the Humanities, took second place in 1976.

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, U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins and many others.

For more information, please see: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/offices/comm/csj/041103/poetry.shtml

In addition, Glascock organizer Brad Leithauser, Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer in the Humanities, is available for interview at 413-538-2808. An interview with Olivia Bustion '03 can also be arranged.