JOIN US – ON ZOOM Thursday, July 25th from 7:30-9 PM EST The top ten finalists will read live on Zoom during Thursdays with ESWA. Three winners will be awarded prizes after the readings! Now in it’s 6th year, this year’s contest will be judged by Poet Laureate of Salisbury, Nancy Mitchell who will be joining us as we announce the winning entries. REGISTER HERE |
2024 CROSSROADS CONTEST FINALISTS (in alphabetical order) |
Janice F. Booth Catherine Carter ’s Carol Casey | Katherine Gekker is the author of In Search of Warm Breathing Things (Glass Lyre Press). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including CALYX (forthcoming) and Rappahannock Review. She serves as Assistant Poetry Editor for Delmarva Review. Two collections of Gekker’s poems have been set to music by composers Eric Ewazen and Carson Cooman. Gekker was born in Washington, DC. She founded a commercial printing company in 1974 and sold it 31 years later. Heidi Kasa Jennifer Keith writes and plays bass for the rock band Batworth Stone. Her poems have appeared in The Free State Review, Best American Poetry 2015, and elsewhere. Keith was a finalist for the 2021 Erskine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace. Her first full-length book of poems, Terminarch, won the 2023 Able Muse Book Award and is due out in 2024. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Betsy Mars | Michael Salcman: former chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland, a child of the Holocaust and survivor of polio. Poems in Barrow Street, Blue Unicorn, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review and Smartish Pace. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti, Poetry in Medicine, classic and contemporary poems about medicine, A Prague Spring (Sinclair Poetry Prize), Shades & Graces, Daniel Hoffman Book Prize winner, Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems, and Crossing the Tape (2024).
Stephanie Susan is a queer poet. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire with a BA in Creative Writing and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is finishing the low-residency MFA program at Augsburg University, focused on poetry. Her work often explores nostalgia, family, relationships, queer identity, body and sex positivity, feminism and pop culture. Stephanie lives in small town Wisconsin and works as a bookseller for Barnes and Noble.
Christina M. Rau’s |
About This Year’s Judge
Salisbury Poet Laureate, Nancy Mitchell
NANCY MITCHELL is the author of The Near Surround, Grief Hut, and The Out-of-Body Shop, and co-editor of Plume Interviews I. A recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her poems have appeared in such journals as Agni, Green Mountains Review, Ploughshares, and Washington Square Review. She has taught in the English and Environmental Studies Departments at Salisbury University, Maryland, and is an Associate Editor for Plume Poetry Journal. She hosts the Zoom Reading Series Poets on the Plaza and serves as the Poet Laureate of the City of Salisbury, Maryland.