Photo courtesy of Shana Hansell.
Mason Ryan Newbury, pictured above, will represent Suffolk University at Mount Holyoke College’s centennial Glascock Poetry Competition.
By Olivia Wilson ’24
Books Editor
Mason Ryan Newbury will represent Suffolk University at Mount Holyoke College’s centennial Glascock Poetry Competition happening from March 31 to April 1, 2023. He is “very excited” for the competition and “all of the cool opportunities [he’s] getting along with it.”
According to the website, the poetry contest will consist of a roundtable with the judges of the competition and a reading of the contestants’ work on the 31st, and April 1 will feature a reading by the three judges and the announcement of the winner followed by a reception.
Newbury, a senior at Suffolk who is majoring in English with a creative writing concentration and a minor in philosophy, says that he has been interested in poetry since the age of thirteen thanks to Savannah Brown, who posted her poetry on Youtube when Newbury came across it. Poetry with a “tragic element” also inspires Newbury, who cites Plath and Keats as other inspirations for the way he writes his poetry.
He describes his poetry as “extremely personal” and an outlet to explore his “own thoughts and perspective on the world.” The two poems that he will be sharing at the competition “both share a distinct ‘spiraling’ quality” that emulates what he feels late at night when he’s examining his own life.
“To me,” he said of his poems, “they both read like the unyielding, anxious thought process I go through late at night when I’m laying in bed thinking about and dissecting, my life.”
As life itself inspires the content of his poetry, it also inspires Newbury’s writing process. “I can never force myself to write,” he said of his process. The work “just kind of falls out of me when its time comes.” Newbury added that some of his work was written in the margins of notes during classes and nights full of not being able to sleep.
Newbury will be reading his work on March 31 at the Glascock poetry contest and work of his has also been published in Suffolk University’s ‘Venture Magazine’ as well as Mary Baldwin’s ‘Outrageous Fortune.’