“The Night Was White” — runner-up for DiBiase Poetry Prize

“The Night Was White” comes in at #37!

The annual Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry contest was founded in 2015. Initially primarily entered by New York poets, the contest has become increasingly international in scope with entrants from about 40 different countries each year. 

Bob Sharkey is the editor of the contest which is sponsored by his family. They decided to name the contest after Stephen DiBiase who was Bob’s best childhood friend.

The contest was designed by Bob to be unlike other contests and avoid some of the things that discouraged him from submitting to them. There are no entry fees. The $2,500 or so prize money is spread out among the top entrants with a modest first place prize award of $500. There are no line or page limits and the contest gladly reads all forms of poetry and is open to all subjects and topics. Published or unpublished work is welcome. There are no age limits and we typically receive many submissions by younger poets, some who have won prizes or recognition.

The editor reads each submission and selects from 30 to 40 poems to send to our panel of judges. Three of the judges are permanent and a fourth judge is the previous year’s first prize winner. The judges work independently and pick their top five selections as well as some honorable mentions. The resulting scores are added together to determine the prize winners. Usually, the scoring for the top four places is close and we have adjusted the prize amounts to reflect this.

The above is a trimmed version of the “about” page of the DiBiase Poetry Prize website. 

Since my poem is rather far down in the rankings that would have meant no prize money in prior years. This time, though, Bob Sharkey writes, “We had a record 911 submissions from 58 countries. Because of the judges favorable impression of the entire field of final poems and in order to demonstrate the variety of poetic expression that we receive as submissions, we have decided to publish all final poems on our website (DiBiasepoetry.com.) We have also decided that each poet should receive a small reimbursement for publication.”

The usual deadline for entering the contest is January 31, I understand. I will keep it on my radar for next year — you should too! No entry fee! Previously published work is eligible. Those are pretty sweet rules.