Tag Archives: Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest

It’s Officially Sonnet Season! Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest (2023) is Now Open!

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It is February, a month when young and old turn to thoughts of love, Valentines, and, of course, sonnets. It is also the month when the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest opens to receive new submissions.

2023 Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest

Call for EntriesEntries are now being accepted for the 2023 Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. The entry process is a one-step system. Sonnet(s) must be submitted with the Entry Form. Complete instructions for entering are available on our website. The Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest is an annual event that welcomes entries from around the world.

Cash prizes, totaling over $3,000, will be awarded in several categories, including:Top Four Sonnets Regional (Four Winners – Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa) Best Youth (Four Winners – High School and Younger) Laureate’s Choice (Sixteen Winners)There is a $5 Entry Fee for up to three sonnets per entry. There is no fee for entrants in the Youth category (high school and younger) or for undergraduate college students.

For complete contest information, visit:sonnetcontest.org The deadline for entries is June 1, 2023. Submissions should be made through our on-line process, with payment option by PayPal or check. If this process presents a hardship, instructions for entering by mail will be provided upon request. Just send us an email: entries@sonnetcontest.org

Based in Winona, Minnesota, this magnificent yearly contest is a treasure and an opportunity. Past winning sonnets are listed on the MWF website (link above). Why not read some for fun, and then, if the spirit moves, try writing one of your own? You just might have a prize-winning sonnet of your own! Not sure how? The Sonnet Contest website includes guidelines as well as examples, and lots more information about poetry and the arts.

And, while sonnets have been connected for hundreds of years to love poetry, the sonnet is an incredibly flexible and dynamic form that can express a multitude of tones, emotions, ideas, and imagery.

Want more sonnets? The Academy of American Poets is offering a month of sonnets on their Poem-a-Day pages. Curated this month by guest editor Patricia Smith, each day in February 2023 will love poems in sonnet form by African American poets–honoring also National African American History Month. Here is an interview with Smith (in print and in recorded voice clip form) and a bit more about her own work as a poet.

And if you already have a favorite sonnet, I would love it if you would let me know!

Happy February!

Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest Celebration 2022

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Maria W. Faust (image courtesy of Ted Haaland)

In 2022, for the second time, I was able to join in the judging of the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. This phenomenal contest, now in its tenth year under the patronage of Ted Haaland, husband of the late Maria W. Faust, has grown from 85 entries in 2013. In 2022, 700 sonnets were received from 42 US states plus Washington, DC and 10 other countries—an increase of 15% over 2021. Entries in the Youth category jumped 50%. Through the
contest, poets around the world now know of Winona, Minnesota and its thriving arts community.

The contest encourages the creation of modern poems in sonnet form. It is made possible through the efforts of many, many people: not only the financial patronage and moral support of Ted Haaland (please see below for tributes to Ted in his tenth year as patron of the contest!) but also the dedication and vision of the Great River Shakespeare Festival, the Winona Arts Center, the River Arts Alliance, the contest judges (poets and long-time judges James Armstrong, Ken McCullough, Emilio DeGrazia, as well as, more recently, me,) and the “Sonnet Crew” led by Heidi Bryant and mightily assisted by Johanna Rupprecht, Steve Bachelor, and Jackie Henderson.

Click HERE to view the video of the closing ceremony held at the Winona Arts Center on Saturday, July 30, 2022. Hear a short statement by Contest patron Ted Haaland, as well as each of the sonnets read either by the winning poet or by Doug Scholz-Carlson or actor of the Great River Shakespeare Festival and the musical artistry of Winona’s woodwind quartet Flutistry. The Winona Post covered the event in two separate articles.

Tributes to Ted Haaland:

“Ted’s sponsorship of the Maria Faust Sonnet Contest makes Winona an international sonnet center. Poets who are challenged and inspired by the classical sonnet form now have a place to showcase their art. Thanks to Ted’s vision, area sonneteers—experts and novices alike—have the opportunity to attend poetry events, and young poets are being specifically encouraged to connect with the tradition. Ted has found an excellent way to spread his love of poetry and to help expand Winona’s reputation as an arts destination, and we are so grateful to him.” —Jim Armstrong

“Being a judge of the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest has been a boon to me personally, in my own writing. Reading so many sonnets has, by osmosis, calibrated my poem-making apparatus to 14 lines, mostly iambic pentameter; I get in, say what needs to be said, then get out. I know that I will have the opportunity to make several turns at critical junctures within those 14 lines. I still write an occasional longer poem, but the sonnet has converted me. Thanks to Ted Haaland’s generosity, our contest has grown exponentially, in quality and in reputation, and with it the receptivity of Winonans to poetry in general.” —Ken McCullough

“Ted Haaland knew too well how important honest and heart-felt words are. He had many for his beloved Maria and spent many hours honoring her with those he had crafted himself. He has been most generous in passing on to others, including the young, his sense that poetry is a vital sustainer of good life, especially in life’s darkest times.” —Emilio DeGrazia

“Ted Haaland is a generous-minded visionary. His love for his late wife, Maria, who was a
passionate supporter of the arts, has moved him not only to write his own sonnets, but also to celebrate and encourage the creation of new poems in this versatile and powerful sonnet form by more than a thousand poets, people he has never personally met. By his unwavering support, he has created a truly living memorial, not just to Maria, but to powerful comfort that love—and love of true, artfully rendered words—offers to us all.” —Leslie Schultz

Ted’s head is filled with words. Images and music find their place . . .
As the day unfolds, words react to something, escape, focus and
find themselves organized on paper,
Part of the day’s thought and experience, now captured in a poem.
The word supply in Ted’s head is inexhaustible. The words wait for a new
day’s living that will tickle them into action.

What a marvelous contribution Ted continues to make to our welfare honoring his wife in the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest.” —David Marshall

Click HERE to read the 2022 winning sonnets in a digital book form.

April 6, 2022: Spotlight on SCRIPTORIUM: POEMS by Melissa Range; MWF Sonnet Contest Workshop with Range on April 12, 2022 in Winona, Minnesota; and Background for My Poem “Wyvern”

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I learned only recently about the extraordinary poetry of Melissa Range through the upcoming opportunity to hear her read and discuss sonnets that will be happening at the Blue Heron Coffeehouse at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 12, 2022 in Winona, Minnesota. This event is the kick-off celebration for the annual international Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. Go, if you possibly can! It should be an extraordinary experience. Here is a short description form the MWF website: Turn and Turnabout: Contemporary Sonnets will be presented by Melissa Range. From Melissa, “The sonnet is one of the most flexible of poetic forms, lending itself to all kinds of formal innovations. We will look at a handful of contemporary sonnets and talk about how contemporary poets both follow and break the rules of the sonnet, as well as how the flexibility of the sonnet affects us as readers and inspires us as writers. Time permitting, we may also do a short sonnet exercise!”

Range’s work in Scriptorium: Poems [a winning manuscript in the 2015 National Poetry Series] is, as former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith notes in the introduction, “All the many formal commands to which Range’s poems gladly bend are in the service of something urgent, something having to do with a view of language as a means of survival.”

Indeed.

Range at Window 2
Poet Melissa Range

Background for My Poem, “Wyvern”:

When I run across an unfamiliar word in my reading, especially one I like the sound of, I look it up. Sometimes I jot it down in my Alphabet Soup notebook as the title for a someday poem. Earlier this spring, I happened on the word “wyvern” and it intrigued me. Its etymology winds back through Middle English and Old North French to the Latin word “vipera” which suggests not only “viper” but, by association, “snake,” “serpent,” and “dragon.” I have learned that the wyvern could be regarded as a littler dragon-wannabe. In mythology and heraldry, wyverns (which have but two legs and beaks, as opposed to four-legged dragons who have open mouths glittering with teeth) are smaller. They don’t breathe fire or lay waste to whole landscapes or amass and guard golden hoards or debate sagaciously with the gold of their word hoards. They are smaller and less impressive, usually stingingly vicious and generally unpleasant but not so deadly. Yet they appear in heraldry not infrequently, even for modern sports teams in the U.S. and Britain, as an emblem of persistence. Perhaps think mosquito rather than grizzly bear?

I am sure today’s poem was influenced by my recent enjoyment of Range’s work.

Postage stamp printed in Austria shows The wyvern of Klagenfurt, Sages and Legends serie, circa 1997

My loose sonnet construction imagines an upstart wyvern being slapped down by a proper dragon, and, as an aside, a comment of literary ambition.

For some reason, I keep thinking of this photograph I took at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden:

Happy Reading! Happy Writing! LESLIE

2022 Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest Open Until June 1

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What better way could there be to celebrate National Poetry Month in April this year than by writing a sonnet or three and submitting it to the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest?

Interested in trying your hand? Take a look at their website: entries@sonnetcontest.org. If you like, you can opt in for email updates. And if your are able to be in beautiful Winona, Minnesota on Tuesday, April 12, 2022, you won’t want to miss a very special sonnet celebration–readings and discussions at the Blue Heron Coffeeshop with poets Melissa Range and Ken Mogren. (I will have more later in the month on Melissa Range’s dazzling collection of poems (including sonnets) called Scriptorium (Beacon Press, Boston, 2016).

Happy reading and writing this spring! LESLIE

Celebrating Sonnets: Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest–2021

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As many of you know, I first got to know the City of Winona, Minnesota through participating in the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest as a poet who writes in the sonnet form. Growing out of the successful Great River Shakespeare Festival, established in 2008, the Contest was the brainchild of Winona Poet Laureate James Armstrong and GRSF Artistic Director Doug Scholz-Carlson. Since a small regional start nine years ago, this contest has become a vibrant national and international incubator and celebrator of some of the best sonnets being written by contemporary poets. This expansion has been made possible by the participation of all three of Winona’s Poet Laureates (James Armstrong, Ken McCullough, and Emilio DeGrazia), by the diligent creativity of program administrator Heidi Bryant, and by the extraordinary and far-sighted philanthropy of Ted Haaland, husband of the late Maria W. Faust.

My own first submission was in 2013, and since then this annual contest has been an exciting part of my year, whether or not I had a submitted sonnet honored or not. Each year has been an opportunity to write new sonnets, submit my very best, and plan to attend the Closing Reading to hear sonnets read by actors in the GRSF company or by poets able to attend.

This year, I was honored to be asked to join James Armstrong, Ken McCullough, and Emilio DeGrazia as a judge. This year, a total of 604 poems were submitted from 214 people (poets can submit one, two, or three sonnets per submission.) These poets hail from thirty-five states and ten countries. Of special note this year, entries in the Youth category were up 58 percent, from 31 in 2020 to 49 in 2021!

All poems are judged blind–that it, the judges do not know who the author is, so the poem must speak for itself. With so many truly fine poems–excellent examples of the sonnet form, and, more than that, compelling writing on a large range of subjects, with varying points of view, tone, and use of language–it was very difficult for me to select my top choices, but I did manage to do that by going over the best submissions several times. When the judges met in July to compare lists and select the top winning poems in each category, I was struck by how often judges were in agreement on the merits of poems. I was also delighted that each judge was able to champion four “Laureates Choices” once the top poems were selected. A special pleasure at the end of that process–once all the winners were selected–was learning the names of these fine poets and seeing who had written each poem. Many I recognized through reading their work before: Scott Lowery, Marilyn Taylor, Anna Evans, Jean L. Kreiling, and Barbara Lydecker Crane. Most were new to me. Now all these names are ones I shall look for in the journals I read in the years ahead.

Names of the winning poems poets, and the full text of each sonnet, in a splendid digital version of a program with turning pages, is available on the contest website as well.

Below is a video of a Zoom meeting in which many of the poets were able to read their own winning poems. For those poets with winning poems who were not able to attend, either one of the judges or a member of the Great River Shakespeare Festival Company stepped in, so every winning sonnet can be heard as well as read.

The City of Winona is a bastion of lively writers, artists, and musicians, filled with good conversation, good food, and (of course!) amazing theatre through the annual Great River Shakespeare Festival. Most recently, I was able to learn more about the deeper history of the area through this beautifully written play by Emilio DeGrazia, enhanced by a thoughtful and thought-provoking introduction by Monica DeGrazia.

Stained glass window at the Winona Visitors Center

Wishing you continued adventures–reading, writing, exploring, and enjoying the remaining days of summer!

LESLIE