The Sword Review is very excited by its first Poetry Contest! The entries are in and the judges have made their choices. Thanks to all who entered!

There were no entry fees for this contest, and its purpose was to generate new interest in The Sword Review among speculative poets, as well as to find and promote excellent and diverse speculative poetry.

We received 49 entries, many of them from first time contributors to The Sword Review, and there was a very high level of quality and competition. The following prizes were paid:

First Place: $50.00 US
Second Place: $25.00 US
Honorable Mention: $12.50 US
Honorable Mention: $12.50 US

All four winning poems were published in The Sword Review's July Issue (16) and the winning poets received a contributor's copy of the print version of the magazine.

Contest Theme and Guidelines

This year's theme was HOPE.

Content was to conform to the standards of our general submission guidelines for fiction. The length of the poem was constrained to fit the SFPA short poem definition of 49 lines or fewer. All entries were read blind, with the poet's name and information unknown to the judges.

The Judges

There were three judges - The Sword Review's poetry editors, Marcie Lynn Tentchoff and R V Saunders; and David Kopaska-Merkel, who kindly agreed to lend his considerable talent and wisdom to the contest.

David Kopaska-Merkel edits and publishes Dreams and Nightmares, an award-winning genre poetry magazine with a 20-year history. His poems, stories, and reviews have appeared in many parts of the small press for a quarter of a century, garnering numerous awards. Kopaska-Merkel grew up in what was once the largest state, and now lives in one reveling in its prolongation of the 19th century. It is perhaps fitting that he studies rocks for a living (actually the holes in the rocks). He has been known to examine fragments of 300 million-year-old reefs and to pretend to work on the beach. He lives in a centuried farmhouse, now close to the middle of town, with two artists, three furry adopted children, and a host of vermin, both visible and microscopic. All of this makes him ideally suited, of course, to judge a poetry contest. And he always wanted to be a judge.

Marcie Lynn Tentchoff is an Aurora Award winning poet/writer from the west coast of Canada. Her work has appeared in such magazines as Weird Tales, On Spec, Aoife's Kiss, and Dreams & Nightmares, as well as in many anthologies and online publications.

R V Saunders lives in Kent, England with his wife and lots of books. His short stories, poetry and articles have appeared in a variety of critically-acclaimed publications from Dreams and Visions to Deep Magic. He is currently working on his first novel.

In his spare time, R V Saunders is poetry editor for The Sword Review and Dragons, Knights and Angels.