Creative Writing Faculty Legacy Award for Poetry

This award recognizes outstanding poetry by a graduate student in the English master’s or doctoral program. Submit up to three pages of unpublished poems. A PDF file is preferred and simple file names without punctuation, spaces, capital letters, or special characters will experience the least technical problems. E.g. mymanuscript.pdf instead of my_Manuscript.PDF

Applications are typically accepted in mid-spring semester.

The 2024 poetry judge is Nicky Beer. Nicky is a bi/queer writer, and the author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes (Milkweed, 2022), winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. She has received honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Poetry Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She has also led workshops, craft classes, and craft talks for the Indiana University Writers’ Conference, the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference, the Yale Young Writers’ Workshop, and more. She is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she is a poetry editor for Copper Nickel.