This morning’s post comes to you from the kitchen of my parents’ kitchen in Las Vegas, NV. It is only my second time visiting them since they moved here several yeras ago (right at the top of the pandemic), and so it doesn’t feel quite as comfortable as the childhood home where my family and I have spent Thanksgiving for the past couple decades. And yet. The chipped and faded yellow mugs from which my older brother and I drank our first cups of coffee are in these cabinets. My parents’ prized photos of their mothers and siblings are carefully arranged atop the baby grand piano. A package of rice cakes (even though literally no one in this family likes rice cakes) has again found its way to the pantry, where it will go uneaten and unopened. And as I’m writing this to you now, my mind is flooded with all the traditions that have followed our famly across the country and into this brand new home.
The Joanna Catherine Scott Award is all about tradition. It celebrates creativity, technical proficiency, and challenges us to express brand new ideas in traditonal forms. We want your sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, and pantoums. Bops and ballades. Centos and ghazals. Because meeting the requirments of your chosen form may require more than the traditional Pinesong limit of 36 lines, submissions to the Scott contest may be up to 50 lines.
This year’s Joanna Catherine Scott Award is judged by D.J. Rogers, poet, essayist, and educator in teh Research Triangle of North Carolina. He is currently a consultnat on euity and diversity for a fiction Podcast, a teacher coach, and the sitting Poet Laureate for the city and county of Durham, NC. His work can be found at FreezeRay Poetry, Wingless Dreamer Press, and Black Nerd Problems.
I cannot sign off without acknowledging how thankful I am to have the opportunity to do this work with and for you – how grateful I am to spend a part of this day reading and sharing poems. Take a look at this gorgeous sestina by Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman, and a breathtaking ghazal from Agha Shahid Ali. Praying that today finds you well.
Lumpkin out.
PINESONG AWARDS 