“The orchard was on fire, but that didn’t stop him from slowly / walking / straight into it, shirtless,” reads Carl Phillips from his poem “Dirt Being Dirt” in this video produced by Washington University in St. Louis where he is a professor. Phillips, author of fifteen books of poetry, most recently Pale Colors in a Tall Field (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), is the recipient of the 2021 Jackson Poetry Prize.
Find details about every creative writing competition—including poetry contests, short story competitions, essay contests, awards for novels, grants for translators, and more—that we’ve published in the Grants & Awards section of Poets & Writers Magazine during the past year. We carefully review the practices and policies of each contest before including it in the Writing Contests database, the most trusted resource for legitimate writing contests available anywhere.