Foetry: American Poetry Watchdog

Exposing the fraudulent "contests."

Tracking the sycophants.

Naming names.

The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference of Middlebury College sponsors the Bakeless Literary Publication Prizes:

• charges $10 to enter
• "No judge is mandated to pick a winner if he or she does not deem the finalist manuscripts ready for publication."
• There was no award for creative nonfiction in 1997, 1998, and 2002. Your poetry manuscript could be next.
• Claims that the "guidelines will help to insure efficient handling of the manuscripts as well as the process of judging them anonymously." However, the incident below looked pretty bad.
• c_dale_young says,

  Now, as for the Jennifer Grotz thing. She was never Komunyakaa's student. She never took a class with him at Indiana. He sat on her thesis committee, but none of the poems she wrote for her thesis are included in Cusp, her collection that won the Bakeless. I also happen to know that when Komunyakaa selected Grotz's ms. he had no idea who she was, even after he was told the name of the poet who wrote the collection.

• C. Dale Young is incorrect on at least one vital point: Many of the poems that appear in CUSP are also in Ms. Grotz's thesis.  Komunyakaa's signature appears on the thesis and he then selected this book as "winner" of the Bakeless.
  

Please urge Mr. Ian Pounds, contest coordinator and/or Middlebury's President, Ronald D. Liebowitz to include a rule which prohibits entries by students/friends of that year's judge. Please also press for a change to the "no judge is mandated" rule.