Deacon's Blog

From Dr. John Guzlowski

Dr. Mary Ann Miller, Associate Professor of English, Caldwell College, Caldwell, NJ, is calling for submissions of poems for a proposed anthology of contemporary American poems that contain references to one or more Catholic saints (excluding Jesus and Mary).

All e-mail submissions must be Sent To Dr. Miller by 11:59 p.m. on Friday, June 1, 2012. The subject line should read: “saint poem(s)”

GUIDELINES:

• Up to 3 poems per poet will be accepted for consideration.
• Each poem must be no longer than 3 pages.
• The poems should NOT be historical poems, i.e. “lives of the saints” in modern idiom, written in the voice of the saint speaking in the first person “I,” NOR should they be prayers addressing the saint in the second person “you.”
• Personae SHOULD be contemporary voices, male and female, from a variety of social, regional, and occupational circumstances. Voices of poems already selected from traditional research are speaking within very specific contemporary dramatic contexts, such as: a mother trying to get her newborn to fall asleep at 3 a.m., a man returning to a depressed coal town in western Pennsylvania after abandoning it to live elsewhere, a Native American child experiencing the pains of assimilation in a Catholic school, an older brother concerned about the kind of marriage his younger sister might make, a burn victim’s compassion for a small child with whom he shares a hospital room, a woman holding the hand of her dying mother, a Hungarian Catholic woman whose marriage to a Jewish man causes her father’s rejection, a woman doing laundry, a family moving out of their home, a disillusioned nurse whose back goes out from lifting so many bodies, a medical doctor struggling to inform a patient of his terminal illness, a friend of a gay person who died of AIDS, a friend of a woman who attempted suicide, a patron of a food pantry who finds money on the floor.
• Poems of humor and irony are welcome.
• Published and unpublished poems may be submitted. If published, please include all original publication information in bibliographic format at the end of the poem.
• Send submission as a single-file Word attachment to Dr. Miller. The first page should list the poet’s name, phone number, and e-mail contact information, a brief 4-line bio, and the titles of submitted poems. The poet’s name should appear on each poem.
• The editor will respond by e-mail to all submissions within a month of the submission deadline.
• The editor is in the process of finding a publisher for this anthology and, therefore, cannot guarantee its publication. She is proposing a collection of approximately 50 poems.