Congratulations to our 2004 winners!

Thank you for entering the 2004 Washington Poets Association poetry contest. 304 poets sent us a total of 1,480 poems this year! We appreciate your support of our group and our mission - encouraging the creation and appreciation of poetry. Our winners will be honored April 24 at the Burning Word Festival on Whidbey Island. We hope you can join us.

Winners List!

Judges' Comments

Entry form

Our 2004 judges

Tim McNulty is a poet, essayist, and nature writer. He was born and grew up in Connecticut's Quinnepiac River Valley, and attended Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts in Boston. There, he met poet Denise Levertov who inspired him with her powerful fusion of visionary poetics and political activism. Tim came to the Northwest in 1972 and settled on Washington's Olympic Peninsula.

James Bertolino's poetry has been appearing internationally in books, magazines and anthologies for almost 40 years. His work has been recognized by the Book-of-the-Month Club Poetry Fellowship, the Discovery Award, a Hart Crane publication award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two Quarterly Review of Literature book awards and other regional and national prizes. Nine volumes and fourteen chapbooks of his poetry and prose have been published by such presses as Copper Canyon, Carnegie Mellon, New Rivers, Ithaca House and the QRL Award Series. He holds an MFA from Cornell University and has taught creative writing at Cornell, Washington State, University of Cincinnati, Willamette University and, currently, Western Washington University. His latest volume is Pocket Animals: 60 Poems, published in 2002 by Egress Studio Press.

Tom Erdmann is the last living co-founder of WPA. After 30 years as a member of the board, 25 of them as contest chair, he moved to Arizona, where he joined the AZ Poets Society. In his first two years there he took 3rd then 2nd in its major contest. During his teaching career in Seattle he had over 300 students win local, state and national awards, including the Homer Henderson Award twice, the Totem Award four times and the Stafford award once. Tom has been published in many journals, including Seattle Review, Assay, Bellingham Review and Sandcutter. He has three chapbooks out and is working on his first book.

Michael Dylan Welch is editor of Tundra: The Journal of the Short Poem, vice-president of the Haiku Society of America, and cofounder of both the American Haiku Archives (1996) at the California State Library in Sacramento, and of the Haiku North America conference (1991) that will be coming to Centrum in Port Townsend in 2005. His haiku, longer poetry, book reviews, and essays have appeared in hundreds of journals in ten countries, as well as in numerous anthologies. He leads the "Haiku Garden" reading series at the Japanese Garden in Seattle, is a board member of both the Eastside Writers Association and the Redmond Association of Spokenword, and also served as director of the April 2004 "Poets in the Park" festival in Redmond, WA.

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