May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize

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The May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize is named for May Sarton, the renowned novelist, memoirist, poet, and feminist (1912-1995) who lived for many years in Nelson, New Hampshire, not far from Peterborough, home of William L. Bauhan Publishing. In 1967, she approached Bauhan and asked him to publish her book of poetry, As Does New Hampshire. She wrote the collection to celebrate the bicentennial of Nelson, and dedicated it to the residents of the town.

May Sarton was a prolific writer of poetry, novels, and perhaps what she is best known for—nonfiction on growing older (Recovering: A Journal, Journal of Solitude, among others.) She considered herself a poet, first, though, and in honor of that and to celebrate the centenary of her birth in 2012, Sarah Bauhan, who inherited her father’s small publishing company, launched the prize.

Submissions for the 2025 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize are now open!

Meet our 2025 judge, Anthony Walton!

Anthony Walton is the author of many books, including Cricket Weather, Mississippi: An American Journey, Brothers-in Arms, and most recently, The End of Respectability. 
 
He also was the editor, with Michael S. Harper, of Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep: African American Poetry Since WWII, and The Vintage Book of African American Poetry, two landmark anthologies which filled what had been a large gap in our literary (and pedagogical) landscape.
 
His work has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, Oxford American, PN Review, and The Atlantic Monthly, among many other journals and magazines. Most recently, his poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, Poetry Ireland Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. He teaches at Bowdoin College.

Our 2024 winner, Marcy Rae Henry!

 

For her collection, death is a mariachi

We are pleased to share the results of our 2024 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize with all of our treasured submitters. We received another enormous number of submissions this year, and as in previous years, it always leaves our judge with a difficult decision to make.

Dorsey Craft chose as the winner death is a mariachi, by Marcy Rae Henry of Chicago, Illinois, out of 489 worthy submissions.

Dorsey chose as the other finalists (in no particular order):

Women as Omens – Claire Cronin, Los Angeles, California

Losers – C. Pope, Chicago, Illinois

Ultramarine – Elaine Johanson, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania

Medicine – AD Tenn, Huntington Beach, California

Wantless – Katie Condon, Dallas, Texas

Says the Wolf – Becka McKay, Delray Beach, Florida

A Wasp in a Fig’s Womb – Barbara Duffey, Mitchell, South Dakota

Marcy  will receive $1,000 prize money, publication of the collection with our spring 2025 titles, 50 author copies, and distribution with Casemate IPM.

Dorsey  had this to say about Marcy’s poems: 

“Marcy Rae Henry’s speaker roams from New Orleans to New Delhi in death is a mariachi, a raw yet nuanced exploration of the shifting nature of identity, spirituality, and place. Reckoning with death through the lens of Buddhist ideology, the speaker technicolors her world: a blue-green whiptail lizard reproduces through parthenogenesis, golden oil glistens in petrichor, even the morphine in a grandmother’s IV takes on a kaleidoscopic sheen. Henry engages texts from 1970’s electronica to molcajetes and tejolotes in this intersectional, eco-feminist exploration of the body and the soul, their limits, and their excesses. In her formally inventive and full-throated debut, Henry sings of the liminal, of the “soul separating from skin,” of words that are “useful as bones.” The speaker names what she sees and lets it go. She never tells anyone that she’s time traveling.”

 
 
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