Poets are invited to submit their work to the third annual Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities Poetry Contest. This year’s contest is co-sponsored by The Cleveland Museum of Art and explores the idea of ekphrasis—the verbal representation of a visual object. Poets are asked to choose any work of art in the CMA collection and write a poem in descriptive response to it.
Jorie Graham, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University and former Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets, will serve as judge for the contest.
Winners are expected to participate in “Poetry in the Museum” on Sunday, Oct. 30. In addition to a reading by Jorie Graham, the poetry contest’s four winners will be announced at the event and asked to share their poems with the audience. Winning poems will be published on the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities website and in the CMA newsletter. Winners also will receive special prize packages assembled by the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities.
The contest is open to poets of high school age and above; high-school applicants are judged in their own category. Only poems that have not been published previously may be submitted. The submission deadline is Oct. 12 by 5 p.m.
More information can be found at case.edu/humanities.