Verse Drama Prize

The Poetry Foundation is now accepting submissions for a $10,000 Verse Drama Prize:

Verse drama has a very low profile in the contemporary literary scene—an astonishing fact when one considers that many of the greatest plays, from the Greeks to Shakespeare to T. S. Eliot and Archibald MacLeish, were written in verse. Many of our finest poets, including Edna St. Vincent Millay, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and Anne Carson, have written or translated plays in poetry, while others—Dana Gioia, J.D. McClatchy, and Cornelius Eady, to name a few—have written opera libretti.

Like other Pegasus Awards, the Verse Drama Prize seeks to bring renewed attention to an underrecognized form. In this case, the Poetry Foundation also hopes to encourage poets to work in a new genre and thereby bring fresh life into the art as a whole.

Submissions accepted: April 1, 2007–June 15, 2007

For more information, visit The Poetry Foundation.