Photo courtesy of Shana Hansell.
Ace Chandler FP ’26, pictured above, will be representing Mount Holyoke College at this year’s 100th annual Kathryn Irene Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Contest.
By Jesse Hausknecht-Brown ’25
Managing Editor of Layout & Features Editor
Ace Chandler FP ’26 will represent Mount Holyoke College in the 100th annual Glascock Poetry Contest this weekend. They are excited, although a little bit nervous, for the contest.
Chandler wasn’t aware of the contest before coming to the College and learned about it in one of their classes. “One of my professors brought it up and [it was] one of those moments where something just clicked, it was like, ‘Oh shit, I have this work and I think it’s ready, I’ve been working on it [and] putting it together and let’s just see,” Chandler said. “That’s kind of what guided me to submit and I feel really, for lack of a better word, blessed and excited that I was picked as the contestant and [am] super excited to be performing.”
As described on the website, the “Kathryn Irene Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Contest is the oldest continuously-running poetry contest for undergraduate students in the United States.” Mount Holyoke College hosts the contest every year, and since the second year of the competition, the Glascock committee has invited other colleges to join.
Chandler has been writing “on impulse forever.” They have kept a journal for most of their life, starting when they were a kid. “I think part of the reason I came back to Mount Holyoke was to consolidate those efforts and clarify all the writing that I’ve done and kind of get it together and put it out there,” Chandler said.
In high school in suburban Pennsylvania, Chandler was the editor of the school’s literary magazine. They didn’t receive enough submissions, so Chandler and their friends ended up writing a lot of poetry in order to fill the magazine. “We didn't really have too much knowledge of what exactly we were doing. We were just like, ‘Oh, we got to fatten this lit mag up a little.’ That was one of my first forays in[to poetry],” Chandler said.
Chandler doesn’t like to “work within a set template” in terms of forms of poetry, writing and art more generally. The poems that they submitted to the Glascock Poetry Contest are not “from a specific plan of formal constraint.”
“What I’ll be performing is loosely themed [be]cause it came and comes from a certain time and a place,” Chandler said. “So it has that common thread but it’s not like formally one thing.”
In addition to poetry, Chandler dabbles in writing prose and has a visual arts practice involving working with wax. “I don’t like to be cordoned off into just one thing in particular … My battery gets going when I’m doing multiple, many things,” Chandler said.
Chandler acknowledged that there are “of course a little butterflies,” but is generally excited for the contest.
“I find writing to be … satisfyingly elusive to just try and use words to convey meaning,” Chandler said. “Poetry in particular, it’s kind of like … whittling away the excess of language and really trying to kind of emit a feeling, a vibe, a sentiment whatever it is with just language, [it is] raw in that way [and] I find [it] fun.”