SEQUIM — North Olympic Peninsula poets of every stage — beginners to seasoned writers — are invited to enter the second annual Rainshadow Poetry Competition, open now to the deadline of 5 p.m. Jan. 22.
Poets must be residents of Clallam or Jefferson County and can send up to three poems of up to 30 lines each including the title and any blank lines.
Entries must be typed and sent with the contest fee of $5 for students, $10 for adults and $7 for seniors 65 and older.
Winning poems will be published in the 2016 Rainshadow Poetry Anthology, a book that will be available for $9.95 at the contest’s public reading, to be held at 2 p.m. May 1 at Olympic Theatre Arts, 414 N. Sequim Ave.
Winners will each receive a free copy of the anthology.
To ask questions about the competition — and to submit entries by email — write to RainshadowPoets2016@gmail.com and then go to www.RainshadowPoetry.com to pay the fee via PayPal.
To submit poems by regular mail, send entries and checks to Judy Duncan/Poetry, P.O. Box 1033, Sequim, WA 98382.
More about these events can also be found on the Rainshadow Poetry page on Facebook.
Workshops
To gain skills and inspiration, children, teens and adults can participate in any or all of the poetry-writing workshops scheduled in early January at the Port Angeles Library, 2210 S. Peabody St., and at the Sequim Library, 630 N. Sequim Ave.
Details about these workshops will be announced later on the Rainshadow Poetry online sites and on the North Olympic Library System site, www.NOLS.org.
This past spring’s inaugural competition, organized by Judy Duncan and Ruth Marcus of Sequim, honored the memory of the late Jim Fisher, a well-known poet and professor at Peninsula College who inspired many new writers.
The 2015 Rainshadow Poetry anthology published 56 winning poets, many of whom participated in the April public reading at Olympic Theatre Arts.