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2023 Poetry Competition

Valiant Scribe Literary Journal launched its biennial poetry competition on 10 June 2023. The contest "Let there be light!" accepted submissions until 15 July 2023, garnering up to one-thousand and forty-eight (1048) admissible entries, almost double from its inaugural year of 2021!

Thanks to all who shared their beautiful work with us. Entries that followed our submission guidelines were acknowledged by email and admitted to be considered by our judges. To ensure fair consideration of submissions, a Valiant Scribe volunteer de-identified entries before passing them on to the judges.

Winner

"Hanamo"

Flo Au

.Thanks to Flo for donating her winnings back to Valiant Scribe.

Honorable Mention

"Stay Till the Dawn, You Might Get the Sun"

Fatima Abdullahi

"Like a Snail I'll Taste the World an Inch at a Time"

Anne Marie Wells

"Firefly"

Katherine Gotthardt

"Skytrain Serenade"

Ace Baker

"Scars"

Chris White

"As Fate Uncuffs Another Dawn" & "In Pursuit of the Things that Don’t Demand my Demise"

Chisom Charles Nnanna

"Even Jesus asked where God was"

Renee Emerson

"Since I Saw the Ocean" & "At the Professor’s Table"

Sarah-Kate Simons

Judges

Norma Hopcraft

Norma Hopcraft is a journalist, corporate communications and press relations writer, and a recently retired major donor proposal writer for a large non-profit. She has been writing for 35 years, has three novels on Amazon, and got her B.A. in Creative Writing and Literature from New York University, where she studied modern poetry. She has written numerous poems and has critiqued them and read them as an admirer and student for 35 years. She has a memoir, a book of essays, and two new novels in the works.

Jaime Grookett

Jaime Grookett is an American poet and writer whose poetry and fiction is featured in literary magazines and anthologies, such as Typehouse Literary Magazine, Flip Sides Anthology, They Call Us Magazine and Quail Bell Magazine. Her short story "Fine is for Sugar" earned “Best of Fiction, 2020” at Across the Margin. In 2022, she received her MFA from Drexel University. She is a guest editor at Valiant Scribe and teaches in the College of Education at Rowan University. Her debut novel, The Invisible Ones, is forthcoming in early 2024 with Pegasus Publishing. She is currently working on a poetry collection.

Debra Ayis

Debra Ayis is an award-winning writer and poet published in over 100 anthologies, reviews, magazines, journals, and devotionals such as the City University of New York (CUNY) Killens Review of Arts & Letters; Heart of Flesh Literary Journal, the Hopkinsville Community College’s Round Table Literary Journal, Agape Review, ForwardPress, Triumph House, Forward Poetry, YouVersion, Our Daily Bread, and others. She has read poetry in venues such as The Players NYC, the Annual New York Poetry Festival (2018-2019), Queens Library-Forest Hills, and many other festivals and venues.