Jane Underwood Poetry Prize
About the Prize
The Jane Underwood Poetry Prize was established to celebrate and memorialize Jane Underwood, the founder and long-time director of The Writing Salon who passed away in 2016. Jane was a gifted poet who made The Writing Salon a prominent and respected creative writing school in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was well known for her generous spirit and her direct and encouraging teaching style. A posthumous collection of her poems, entitled When My Heart Goes Dark, I Turn the Porch Light On, was published in 2017.
Open to all poets, the Jane Underwood Poetry Prize is awarded for a single poem. The 2024 final judge is Brian Teare. The prizewinner will receive a $500 award and publication at The Writing Salon’s website.
2023
Congratulations to the Winner!
The 2023 Jane Underwood Poetry Prize winner is Angel Bista for her poem “Notes on the War, from My Mother.”
Finalists:
Fay Dillof
Julia B. Levine
Melissa McKinstry
The Prizewinner Will Receive
An award of $500
Publication of the winning poem at The Writing Salon’s website
An invitation to do a featured reading at The Writing Salon
An award of $500
Publication of the winning poem at The Writing Salon’s website
Contest Guidelines
- The contest is open to all poets.
- The entry fee is $15. This fee is non-refundable.
- Contestants may submit one entry of up to 3 poems. Poems must be sent in a single file.
- Each of the 3 poems may not exceed 80 lines in length.
- We do not consider previously published work, which includes online publications.
- Files should not include any information that reveals the identity of the author. Any entries that reveal the author’s identity will be discounted.
- File name must include the full or abbreviated title of each poem submitted.
- Simultaneous submissions are allowed. Notify us immediately if a poem is placed elsewhere by sending an email to submissions@writingsalons.com.
- Email and mail submissions will not be read.
- All rights revert to the author upon publication of the poem.
- The winner and finalists will be announced at our website.
Important Contest Dates
Submission Period:
Closed to Submissions
The Winner & Finalists will be
announced in March 2025.
Important Contest Dates
Submission Period:
Closed to Submissions
The Winner & Finalists will be
announced in March 2025.
Contest Guidelines
- The contest is open to all poets.
- The entry fee is $15. This fee is non-refundable.
- Contestants may submit one entry of up to 3 poems. Poems must be sent in a single file.
- Each of the 3 poems may not exceed 80 lines in length.
- We do not consider previously published work, which includes online publications.
- Files should not include any information that reveals the identity of the author. Any entries that reveal the author’s identity will be discounted.
- File name must include the full or abbreviated title of each poem submitted.
- Simultaneous submissions are allowed. Notify us immediately if a poem is placed elsewhere by sending an email to submissions@writingsalons.com.
- Email and mail submissions will not be read.
- All rights revert to the author upon publication of the poem.
- The winner and finalists will be announced at our website.
Reading Policy
We believe that blind judging offers contestants a fair and unbiased reading of their work. We assure all contestants that their identity will not be revealed to our readers and ask that they refrain from including identifying information on their submissions. A selection of poets will screen the entries, and Brian Teare will be the final judge. All readers have a distinguished publication record and have won major poetry prizes. Each entry will pass through at least two readers.
2024 Jane Underwood Poetry Prize Final Judge
A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Brian Teare is the author of seven critically acclaimed books, including Doomstead Days, winner of the Four Quartets Prize. His most recent publications are a diptych of book-length ekphrastic projects exploring queer abstraction, chronic illness, and collage: the 2022 Nightboat reissue of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and the fall 2023 publication of Poem Bitten by a Man, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eight years in Philadelphia, he’s now an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.
Hear from Our Judge
Poetry’s role in my life is simple: it seems to me the best, most flexible way to address the thousand questions that arise from being alive. Why? I love that it is as much music as logic, as much rhythm as syntax, and I love its essentially dialectical mix of ideal and quotidian, the poetic and anti-poetic, its marriage of heaven and hell, spirit and matter.
A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Brian Teare is the author of seven critically acclaimed books, including Doomstead Days, winner of the Four Quartets Prize. His most recent publications are a diptych of book-length ekphrastic projects exploring queer abstraction, chronic illness, and collage: the 2022 Nightboat reissue of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and the fall 2023 publication of Poem Bitten by a Man, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eight years in Philadelphia, he’s now an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.
Hear from Our Judge
Poetry’s role in my life is simple: it seems to me the best, most flexible way to address the thousand questions that arise from being alive. Why? I love that it is as much music as logic, as much rhythm as syntax, and I love its essentially dialectical mix of ideal and quotidian, the poetic and anti-poetic, its marriage of heaven and hell, spirit and matter.
Past Winners
2023 – Angel Bista: Notes on the War, from My Mother (selected by Craig Santos Perez)
2022 – Purvi Shah: In a womb – a new era – & Kali’s tongue (selected by Sharan Strange)
2021 – Sydney Vogl: All the Bars Are Closing (selected by Vandana Khanna)
2020 – Kelly Grace Thomas: Nothing Roots or Infertility (selected by David Hernandez)
2019 – John Sibley Williams: Armistice (selected by Rick Barot)
2018 – Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet: When the women imagine their mothers in death (selected by Arisa White)
2017 – Amanda Moore: When I Hear “Horses” as “Corsets” (selected by Julie Bruck, Alison Luterman & Kathleen McClung)
Past Winners
2023 – Angel Bista: Notes on the War, from My Mother (selected by Craig Santos Perez)
2022 – Purvi Shah: In a womb – a new era – & Kali’s tongue (selected by Sharan Strange)
2021 – Sydney Vogl: All the Bars Are Closing (selected by Vandana Khanna)
2020 – Kelly Grace Thomas: Nothing Roots or Infertility (selected by David Hernandez)
2019 – John Sibley Williams: Armistice (selected by Rick Barot)
2018 – Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet: When the women imagine their mothers in death (selected by Arisa White)
2017 – Amanda Moore: When I Hear “Horses” as “Corsets” (selected by Julie Bruck, Alison Luterman & Kathleen McClung)
Ready to Submit Your Poems for the 2024 Competition?
Thea MatthewsThea Matthews
Thea Matthews is a poet, author, and educator originally from San Francisco, California. She holds an MFA in poetry from New York University; and her work has appeared in Southern Indiana Review, Interim, Aster(ix) Journal, Tahoma Literary Review, The New Republic, and others. Her first book Unearth [The Flowers] (Red Light Lit Press, 2020) was listed as part of Kirkus Reviews’s Best Indie Poetry of 2020. She lives in Brooklyn.
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