The Ragan Poetry Competition
The Ragan Poetry Competition was established in 1995 through a generous gift from Dr. James Ragan, a 1966 graduate of Saint Vincent College, who is Director of the University of Southern California’s Graduate Professional Writing Program. The $500.00 cash award honors Dr. Ragan’s parents, John and Theresa Ragan, and is intended to encourage interest in poetry among Saint Vincent students.
To be eligible, entrants must be enrolled as full-time undergraduate students at Saint Vincent during the year of the award, and the work they submit must be previously unpublished in campus or other publications. Poems are submitted for blind evaluation (that is, without the student’s name attached) and they are ranked and chosen by an individual judge. Previous judges, each of them published poets, include Jim Daniels, Lynn Emmanuel, Amy Yanity, Ed Ochester, Peter Blair, Marilyn Bates, and Gerald Costanzo. This year’s judge was poet and IUP English Professor, Dr. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley.
At the end of every Spring Semester, some of the entrants present their poetry at reading here on campus, where they are joined by that year's judge, who commented on the process of judging the competition and also read from her own work. The winning poems, as well as a number of the other entries, are published in the most recent number of Generation, the campus literary magazine.
It is with great pleasure that the Department announces the results of the 2004 competition:
Third Prize goes to senior English major Daniel Wolf for his poem, “I’ll Never Exhale.”
Second prize is awarded to senior Business major and English minor Michael Urick for his poem, “Winter.”
First place and the Ragan Poetry Prize goes to senior Political Science major and English minor Providenza Loera for her poem, “insomnia and joan baez.”
Generation, the Saint Vincent College Literary
Magazine, publishes new poetry, fiction, essays, drawings, and photographs with
each new edition. It is published every Spring. Below is a link to the 2008 issue:
http://www.stvincent.edu/academics/english/generation/index.htm
Alpha Theta Lambda Chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the International English Honor Society, has been chartered at Saint Vincent since Fall 1998.
Activities for Fall 2004 will be posted
after the semester starts.