The Winners of the 2020 Annual Poetry Contest are announced!

LVFSC COVID-19 Response Update

In collaboration with the Farmington Public Library with generous support from Jared Ranger from Western Maine Financial Services and the Susan and Fritz Onion Foundation, the tenth annual Franklin County Poetry Contest has winners! Thank you to ALL the poets who participated.

Age 8-12

First Place: Margaret Bremner, Why?

Second Place: Xavier Judkins, The Tree

Third Place: Avery Pratt, Great Grammie

Age 13-17

First Place: Katrina Machetta, A Crazy Dream

Second Place: Alyana Savage, untitled

Third Place: Alexandria Tripp , C.I.R.E.F. 

Age 18-25

First Place: Mikayla Brown, Spring

Second Place: Chenoa Jackson, Done For Her

 

Literacy Volunteers Adults

First Place: Anna Crockett, Not Knowing

Second Place: Liz Hodgkins, My Amazing Mom

Third Place: Mary Jordan, Wish You Were Here

Age 26+

First Place: Andre Cormier, Mother, May I Revolution

Second Place: Nancy Romines Walters, What Caused It

Third Place: Dave Mitchel, Reflection

 

Judge's Remarks: Laine KuehnThe Franklin County community is lucky to have a contest like this, especially now. It is important to have a place to which people can contribute their voices, and while part of the thrill of a contest is to submit knowing that you may not place in it, I feel outrageously fortunate knowing I get to read to every entry.

      I believe that poetry is a unifying force (and I believe that everyone can, and should, write poems). These last few months have been incredibly difficult for many, but I believe they also offer moments to slow down, moments of self-discovery, and the time to try to find language to talk about the things that move around inside us and matter to us most. As Mary Oliver wrote in her poem “The Uses of Sorrow,” “Someone I loved once gave me / a box full of darkness. // It took me years to understand / that this, too, was a gift.”

        So many voices sang through the poems submitted to this contest this year: voices of resistance, of self-investigation; young, curious voices and old, bright ones; voices which have been silenced and voices celebrating their sound. There were love poems, poems about deep familial bonds, poems of place, poems of quiet and unrepeatable moments, poems with a deft hand of rhyme and form, poems exploring private sorrows and dark places, poems probing deep confusion and poems which howl joy.

      A subset of those voices are represented in these winning poems. They speak for themselves. While we cannot gather in person to hear them together, I hope two things: that we read them aloud to the people in our lives so that they can come alive off the page and in the mouths of people, as some poems are meant to do, and that each of us write a poem in the coming weeks—even if it’s a small one, just for us.

2020 Winning Poems

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