Deadline Feb. 15

The Lanier Library is seeking entries for the Sidney Lanier Award Poetry Competition. This annual competition is open to poets from North and South Carolina whose works have not previously been published in book form. The deadline for entries to be mailed is Feb. 15.

A total of $800 in prizes will be awarded in the adult competition, and additional prizes worth $175 will be awarded to the winning entries from high school students. Other poems worthy of an honorable mention will also be recognized.

The judges of the competition this year will be the North Carolina Poet Laureate Cathy Smith Bowers, a resident of Tryon, and John Lane, an award-winning poet and non-fiction author from Spartanburg, S.C.

Prizes will be presented at an award ceremony, to which all participants as well as the public will be invited, at the Lanier Library on Saturday, April 14 at 2 p.m.

For entry forms and more information about the competition, visit the Lanier Library or www.lanierlib.org.

Established in 1890, the Lanier Library, located on Chestnut Street in Tryon, was named for the esteemed Southern poet Sidney Lanier, from whose home in Tryon it received some of its first volumes. It is one of only 16 membership libraries remaining in the United States and strives to nurture new poetry and literature from promising Southern writers.

– article submitted by Frances Flynn