GLASCOCK COMPETITION AT MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE
SHOWCASES WORK OF STUDENT POETS

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 26, at 8 PM in Gamble Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.

Students are invited from an alternating roster of four to six colleges, with Mount Holyoke holding a permanent place in the contest. Katharine Sapper, a Frances Perkins scholar will represent Mount Holyoke this year, competing against student poets from Brandeis University, Colby College, Hampshire College, the University of Connecticut, and Vassar College. Sapper will be the eighth Frances Perkins scholar, a student of non-traditional age, in the past decade to participate in the competition.

The contestants and the judges will meet at 3 PM on Friday, April 26, 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 27, in the New York Room of Mary Woolley Hall, where the judges will also read from their own work.

Winning a place in the Glascock competition came as a wonderful surprise for Sapper, who has been writing in earnest only since she came to Mount Holyoke from Guatemala City one year ago, to pursue an education and career as a writer in the United States. "I want to be a voice for people in my country who are disenfranchised, who don't have a voice," said Sapper. " I am not a political animal, just interested in people and their souls. I can convey to Americans what I've seen and what my people are like."

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, all of whom were Glascock winners. The College's Mary Jo Salter, Emily Dickinson Lecturer in the Humanities, took second place in 1976.