We are thrilled to announce that Patricia Smith will judge the 18^th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. 

Smith is the author of eight books of poetry, including Incendiary Art; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, a collaboration ion with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson.  Her other books include the poetry volumes Teahouse of the Almighty, Close to Death, Big Towns Big Talk, Life According to Motown; the children's book Janna and the Kings and the history Africans in America, a companion book to the award-winning PBS series. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tin House and in Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. Her contribution to the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir won the Robert L. Fish Award from the Mystery Writers of America for the best debut story of the year and was featured in the anthology Best American Mystery Stories.

Patricia Smith recently won the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She is a Guggenheim fellow, finalist for the Neustadt Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, a former fellow at Civitella Ranieri, Yaddo and MacDowell, a finalist for the 2018 NAACP Image Award in Literature, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history. Patricia is a professor at the College of Staten Island and in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College, as well as an instructor for Cave Canem, the annual VONA residency and in the Vermont College of Fine Arts Post-Graduate Writing Program.

Named in honor of the late founder of BOA Editions, the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize is an annual contest to identify, celebrate, and publish a first book by a poet of unique literary talent. The winner of the 18^th annual prize will receive a $1,000 honorarium and book publication by BOA Editions, Ltd., in spring 2020 as part of the A. Poulin, Jr. New Poets of America Series. Patricia Smith will select the winner (to be announced in the spring of 2019) and will write a foreword to introduce the prize-winning collection.

Any poet who has not previously published a full-length collection of poetry is eligible to submit their first book manuscript for the Poulin Prize. BOA will accept submissions for the prize between August 1–November 30, 2018.

Click here for complete contest guidelines and instructions on how to submit via post or Submittable.