Over the last 100 years, the Mount Holyoke College English department has invited college-aged poets and professional poet judges to the College to participate in the Glascock poetry contest. This year the judges — poets Hoa Ngyuen, Eileen Myles and Evie Shockley — split the prize and awarded it to Dartmouth College senior Tom Bosworth and Pratt Institute senior Portlyn Houghton-Harjo.
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.
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.”
Thomas Bosworth, a senior at Dartmouth College, always knew that he wanted to be a writer. He never expected to become a poet, but after taking a creative writing class he “was bitten by the [poetry] bug and couldn’t stop” discovering new passions and interests through his craft. Now, his work has made him a contestant in the 100th annual Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Competition.
Amherst junior Jordan Trice will compete in the 100th annual Glascock poetry contest. Photo courtesy of Shana Hansell.
By Jesse Hausknecht-Brown ’25
Managing Editor of Layout & Features Editor
Jordan Trice, a junior at Amherst College, can’t remember a time when he “didn’t do lots of bad writing.” Since starting the practice in childhood, he has worked on his craft more and more, recently gaining a spot as a contestant in the 100th Glascock poetry contest.
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.
This year, Amherst College is one of the invited schools with Trice chosen as their representative. A creative writing professor that Trice had taken a class with during his first semester at college emailed him and asked if he would like to do it. “I was like, ‘Yes, of course.’ And then they put me in contact with y’alls people,” Trice said. “And here we are.”
Trice described later researching the contest and seeing that Robert Frost had been a judge and Slyvia Plath had won; this was when he started to become both excited and nervous about the competition.
One moment in particular stood out to Trice in regard to his interest in writing. When he was in sixth grade, a class required everyone to create a presentation about what job they wanted to have when they were older. “I put, kind of as a cop-out because I didn’t really prepare, [that] I wanted to be a writer,” Trice said. “They want[ed] you to have how much money you’d make, so I said ‘it varies’ and then had a picture of books.”
Trice, a double major in English and sexuality, women’s and gender studies, tends to write shorter poems and submitted a number of poems within the time limit. The first two are inspired by his first summer at Amherst when he had a research fellowship looking at “reimaginings of the stories of the women of the Odyssey in contemporary literature.” He was “obsessed” with Penelope, Odysseus’ wife who remains faithful to her husband while he is away on his 20-year-long journey, and was inspired to write.
“I ended up writing a couple of poems, Penelope-inspired poems, I call them my Penelope poems, but those are the opening ones,” Trice said.
In general, Trice draws inspiration from art, whether it be literature, paintings or music. He describes small moments of inspiration and credits Toni Morrison for “[bringing] out a lot of those moments.”
Additionally, he has a habit of writing poetry on planes. His family lives in Tampa Bay, Florida, and every time he gets on a plane to fly home, he ends up writing. “I’ve been trying to tease out why that is but I think it’s partly because I’m listening to music and I have nothing else to do to distract me, no [cell] service or anything,” Trice said. “It’s just whatever music I’ve downloaded on my phone and then I’ll be listening to something and then it’ll just come.”
Trice explained that some of his favorite writers are Toni Morrison, Allen Ginsberg, Maya Phillips — whose poetry collection “Erou,” Trice described as “possibly my favorite poetry collection at the moment” — and Evie Shockley, who is one of the 2023 Glascock judges and who Trice saw read at Amherst during the fall of 2022.
“I’ve been moving in between excited and nervous,” Trice said. “But I think right now I’m feeling excited for [the contest]. I’m excited to meet the other people [and] to meet Evie Shockley again. It seems like a great time and it’s the 100-year anniversary so it sounds like it’s gonna be a very, very fun time.”
“I feel like the Glascock is a survey of American poetry from the last hundred years,” Anna Maria Hong said. Hong is an assistant professor of English and part of the faculty committee of the Kathryn Irene Glascock Poetry Contest. The contest, colloquially called “The Glascock,” took place from April 1-2 in the Stimson Room of Williston Memorial Library and Gamble Auditorium. Competitors included six student contestants from different universities across the eastern United States, judged by three accomplished poets: Mary-Kim Arnold, Nathan McClain and Oliver de la Paz.
