WINNERS ANNOUNCED!

The Poetry Society of America and the Times Square Alliance are proud to announce the five winners of Bright Lights Big Verse: Poems of Times Square, the first-ever national contest for poetry inspired by Times Square.

The five winners, selected from a pool of close to 700 entrants, include Steven Alvarez from New York, NY, for "& So Tio & Chaley"; Simone Muench from Chicago, IL, for "her dreaming feet"; Timothy Donnelly from Brooklyn, NY, for "My Funny Valentine"; Gretchen Fletcher from Ft. Lauderdale, FL, for "Two Giant Men in New York"; and Joshua Rivkin from San Francisco, CA, for "In Praise of What Will Not Last". Each winner will receive $1,000, plus a trip to New York City in June for a free outdoor public reading of their prize-winning work in the heart of Times Square.

The five prize-winning pieces represent Times Square experiences and impressions as disparate and diverse as their authors—from a father's visit to the wartime Times Square of the 1940s to a family's unlikely choice of Times Square as a place to scatter an uncle's ashes to a poem about love, heartache, movie theaters and Ella Fitzgerald.

"The response to this first-ever Times Square poetry contest has been truly outstanding," said Tim Tompkins, President of the Times Square Alliance, "We received hundreds of fascinating and diverse visions of Times Square from so many talented poets—it's really a testament to this neighborhood's ability to provoke strong emotional reactions of every kind, to evoke vivid memories and, above all, to inspire creativity."