Photo courtesy of Shana Hansell.
Portlyn Houghton-Harjo will represent Pratt Institute at the 100th Glascock poetry contest.
By Jesse Hausknecht-Brown ’25
Managing Editor of Layout & Features Editor
Portlyn Houghton-Harjo, a senior at Pratt Institute, is “very excited” to be representing her school at the 100th annual Glascock poetry contest. After Houghton-Harjo had heard that the Pratt writing program had a call for submissions and decided to enter her poems, she was chosen for the contest.
Mount Holyoke has hosted the Glascock poetry contest every year since 1923 and has invited other colleges to join since the competition’s second year. As described on their website, the “Kathryn Irene Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Contest is the oldest continuously-running poetry contest for undergraduate students in the United States.”
When she was younger, Houghton-Harjo’s parents read her Emily Dickinson poetry, Shel Silverstein books and Tim Burton’s “The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories.” She explained that she “loved how these writings dealt with death, love and change.”
Houghton-Harjo first began writing poetry for a poetry unit in middle school, then, in her first year of high school, her English teacher encouraged her to share one of her poems with her parents.
“I did, and people said it was good, so I kept going,” Houghton-Harjo said. “Soon after, I participated in a young Mvskoke women’s writers workshop with Joy Harjo — no relation — and Mary Kathryn Nagle. I was also mentored by the poet Jennifer Foerster for the [For] Girls Becoming program, which paired young Mvskoke women with a mentor in the arts.”
Houghton-Harjo acknowledged that she was very lucky to have these writing opportunities when she was younger and credited them as one of the reasons why she stuck with writing. Lots of things inspire Houghton-Harjo to write and she describes herself as “a very observational writer.” She is also inspired by being Mvskoke and Seminole.
“I think that part of being a poet is finding a bit of inspiration in a lot of things, so I could list so much here. Right now, I’m working on my thesis which focuses on the cyber world, death/mourning rituals and Indigenous states of mind,” Houghton-Harjo said.
She is currently writing “cyber-Indigenous-horror poetry,” which she describes as “good ol’ experimental poetry inspired by folktales, folk art and loss in the digital era.” She also enjoys painting and sewing and altering her clothes; she tries to be “as multidisciplinary as possible.”
Houghton-Harjo is majoring in writing with an emphasis on poetry and hopes to minor in book arts. She has an internship at the Center for Book Arts and enjoys printmaking. “The possibility of language as visual art is vital to my practice. I grew up around art, so I try to keep my finger on the art world pulse. Being in New York, it’s pretty easy. Betye Saar’s work is a major inspiration to me right now. I’ve always loved horror movies and stories, so that’s a big inspiration,” Houghton-Harjo said.
The Glascock poetry contest will be held on Friday, March 31 and Saturday, April 1. The weekend will include a roundtable discussion with the judges, the contest itself and a poetry reading by this year’s judges: Eileen Myles, Evie Shockley and Hoa Nguyen.