Wladyslaw Cieszynski English Fellowship for Verse

The Wlaydslaw Cieszynski English Fellowship is given to an outstanding graduate student in the Department of English. Eligible students must be working on their master’s or PhD in the creative writing track in the Department of English. Eligible students will also have a minimum 3.0 cumulative GPA and be heading into their last year of study (graduating by August of 2025). This contest is for previously published work: one poem of no more than two pages. Online and print publications are both acceptable. Submit a PDF copy of the journal cover or web site’s front page, table of contents when one exists, and the published piece itself with the author’s name blacked out wherever it appears.

Applications are typically accepted in mid-Spring each year.

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.