*** EXTENDED! ACCEPTING ENTRIES THROUGH NOVEMBER 15, 2025 ***
2025 TENNESSEE COLLEGIATE
POETRY CONTEST
Thank you to all who entered our 2025 contest. Winners will be announced soon.
2025 Tennessee Collegiate Poetry Contest Judge
JANE HICKS
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A native of upper East Tennessee, Jane Hicks is an award-winning poet and quilter. The Jesse Stuart Foundation published her first book, Blood and Bone Remember: Poems from Appalachia in 2005. The book met with popular and critical acclaim, winning the Appalachian Writers Association Poetry Book of the Year prize. It was also nominated for the Weatherford Award given by the Appalachian Studies Association. Jane’s poetry has frequently appeared in journals and literary magazines in the southeast, notably Wind, Now & Then, Appalachian Journal, Appalachian Heritage, Asheville Poetry Review, and Shenandoah. Her poems have been anthologized in Migrants and Stowaways and Literary Lunch published by the Knoxville Writers Guild, Crossing Troublesome 25 years of the Appalachian Writers Workshop, Coal: A Poetry Anthology, We All Live Downstream: Writings About Mountaintop Removal, Southern Poetry Anthology: Contemporary Appalachia, Southern Poetry Anthology: Tennessee, and Southern Poetry Anthology: Virginia. Her work appeared in an anthology of poetry with connections to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins. Her “literary quilts” illustrate the works of playwright Jo Carson and novelists Sharyn McCrumb and Silas House. The art quilts have toured with these respective authors and were the subject of a feature in Blue Ridge Country Magazine in an issue devoted to arts in the region. Jane retired from Sullivan County, Tennessee schools after thirty years of teaching. Her second poetry book, published in the fall of 2014 by the University Press of Kentucky, is titled Driving with the Dead. It also won the Appalachian Writers Association Poetry Book of the Year (2015) and was a finalist for the Weatherford Award. Her critically acclaimed third book, The Safety of Small Things, was published by the University of Kentucky Press under Hindman's Fireside Press imprint in early 2024. This book met with wide critical acclaim and was nominated for a number of awards yet to be determined.
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2024 Tennessee Collegiate Poetry Contest Winners
1st Place: “Still” by by Tate Haugen, Tusculum, Greeneville
2nd Place: “East TN Autumn” by Kelsey Ann Guy, East Tennessee State University (ETSU), Johnson City
3rd Place: “Thistle’s Crime” by Kiersten Paxton, Tusculum, Greeneville
Honorable Mentions
“Citico” by Major Joshua Frerich II , Tennessee Wesleyan University, Athens
“Chipped Front Tooth” by Erika Perez Cortazar, ETSU, Johnson City
2nd Place: “East TN Autumn” by Kelsey Ann Guy, East Tennessee State University (ETSU), Johnson City
3rd Place: “Thistle’s Crime” by Kiersten Paxton, Tusculum, Greeneville
Honorable Mentions
“Citico” by Major Joshua Frerich II , Tennessee Wesleyan University, Athens
“Chipped Front Tooth” by Erika Perez Cortazar, ETSU, Johnson City
Tate Haugen is a Wisconsin born writer who moved to Appalachia for college. His free time is spent exploring nature and what it means to be a hunter. He is an avid outdoorsman which his writing shows.
Kelsey Ann Guy is a junior at East Tennessee State University studying Media & Communications with minors in Creative Writing, Fine & Performing Arts, and French. She is a scholar of the Honors College at ETSU for poetry. She hopes to pursue a career in public relations and continue creative writing after graduation.
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Kiersten Paxton was born and raised in Bristol, TN and is currently an English major at Tusculum University. She’s worked as the Assistant Fiction Editor for the international journal The Tusculum Review. Her poem “Take Longer” was published in Tennessee Voices Anthology, 2022-2023. In 2023, she won the Curtis Owens Literary awards for Fiction, Nonfiction, and Drama. She enjoys music, books, and experimenting with different writing styles and genres. She’d like to become a full-time writer after her graduation.
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ABOUT THE JUDGE (2024)
A poet, playwright, essayist, and editor, Linda Parsons is the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. She is published in such journals as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Terrain, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, and many others. Her sixth collection is Valediction: Poems and Prose. Five of her plays have been produced by Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee. She is an eighth-generation Tennessean. July 1, 2025, Linda began a term as Knoxille, Tennessee's 5th Poet Laureate. Learn more and get her schedule here. |
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