Five Winners will receive $1,000 each, plus a trip to New York City to read their winning poems at an event in Times Square.

Submission period: December 15, 2007 - March 1, 2008

The Poetry Society of America and the Times Square Alliance

Help celebrate Times Square, and the qualities that Times Square represents—diversity, desire, dynamism and the marriage of commerce and culture—through poetry.

About the PSA: The Poetry Society of America was founded in 1910 for the purpose of creating a public forum for the advancement, enjoyment, dissemination, and understanding of poetry. PSA programs foster our mission "to place poetry at the crossroads of American life" by raising public awareness of poetry, deepening the understanding of it, and encouraging more people to become readers and writers of poetry. The PSA continues to bring diverse poetry programming that is accessible, engaging, vital in concept and broad in scope to myriad audiences.

About the TSA: The Times Square Alliance, founded in 1992, works to improve and promote Times Square—cultivating the creativity, energy and edge that have made the area an icon of entertainment, culture and urban life for over a century. In addition to providing core neighborhood services with its Public Safety Officers and Sanitation Associates, the Alliance promotes local businesses; encourages economic development and public improvements; co-coordinates numerous major events in Times Square (including the annual New Year's Eve and Broadway on Broadway celebrations); manages the Times Square Information Center; and advocates on behalf of its constituents with respect to a host of public policy, planning and quality-of-life issues.

Judge Bios:

David Lehman is the author of six collections of poems, including When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005). His most recent book of criticism is The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Doubleday, 1998). He is the Series Editor of The Best American Poetry, and the General Editor of the University of Michigan Press's "Poets on Poetry" Series, and has also edited Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present and the most recent edition of The Oxford Book of American Poetry. Lehman's honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts; an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award. He teaches in the graduate writing program at the New School.

Tracie Morris is an interdisciplinary poet who has worked extensively as a sound artist, writer and multimedia performer. Her installations have been presented at the Whitney Biennial and the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning. Tracie is the recipient of numerous awards for poetry and performance and has contributed to, and been written about in, several anthologies of literary criticism. She holds an MFA in poetry from Hunter College and a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University. Dr. Morris is currently Visiting Professor of English at Temple University and the CPCW Fellow in Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

Alice Quinn is the Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America and the Editor of Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). She served for many years as the Poetry Editor at The New Yorker as well as at Alfred A. Knopf. Quinn teaches at Columbia University's School of the Arts.