2024 OPA Adult Contest – Members Only Category – Winners
Judge’s Overall Comments:
Thank you for inviting me to judge this year's Members Only
category. I can truthfully say that I enjoyed reading all 73 poems. I sensed an overarching theme of resilience contained with this collection that defined the mood of many of these blind submissions. Funny how the zeitgeist often comes through. Here are my particular choices.
2nd Place: Louhi Pohjola, “Tiny Landscapes”
3rd Place: Susan Blackaby, “When you come out of a storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in.”
1st HM: Linda Drach, “Central Library”
2nd HM: M. L. Lyons, “All We Ever Wanted Was Beauty”
3rd HM: Carolyn Adams, “A Prayer for the Ordinary Day”
JUDGE
Amy Baskin
Amy Baskin is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, an Oregon Literary Arts Fellow, and an Oregon Poetry Association prize winner. Her work can be found in anthologies and journals including the HOCUS Tarot, Pirene’s Fountain, Friends Journal, and SWWIM. When not writing, she works for the Departments of English and History at Lewis & Clark College and helps run literary arts programs including Fir Acres Writing Workshop. She is the author of the
chapbook Hysterical Cake (Dancing Girl Press, 2021), her collection Night Hag (Unsolicited Press, 2023), and Skull, her exploration of injury and healing, will be out with The Poetry Box this December.