Remembering a Ground-Breaking Contest

 

2021 marks a decade since the closing of the Inglis House Poetry Contest.  While it is little known even within the community of disabled poets, it deserves remembrance as the first annual contest for disabled poets and disability poetry in the United States. 

The contest began in 2003 and ran until 2011. Each year it not only gave small cash prizes to the winners but produced a chapbook of the thirty or so best poems as determined by the judges, who were drawn from Philadelphia’s Inglis House Poetry Workshop. The chapbooks included such titles as Slow Dancing to Invisible Music, She Asks for Slippers While Pointing at the Salt, and Their Buoyant Bodies Respond. 

Over the nine years the contest existed, the winners included names that are now familiar to many readers of disability poetry:  Sheila Black, John Lee Clark, Ona Gritz, Laura Hershey, Lateef McLeod, Kobus Moolman and Liz Whiteacre.   Many other now familiar names appeared in the chapbooks. 

It is a feature of disability poetry itself that, with few exceptions, those who served  judges of the contests and put together the chapbooks are no longer living.  Nevertheless, their work deserves recognition.  The winners of the final contest in 2011 never made it into a chapbook, but they were published by Wordgathering and can be read in the journal’s archives at

https://wordgathering.com/past_issues/issue18/2011winners.html.