2023 Sonnet Contest Winners
The 2023 Winning Sonnets were announced publicly at our Celebrate the Sonnet event on July 15, 2023. Many of the winners participated and the full recording of the event is available on our Events page. The slide show below lists all of the winners along with the people who make the Sonnet Contest possible.
The sonnets are published in a flipbook. Click here to read all of the winning sonnets.
2023 Sonnet Contest Winners
(The sonnets are published in a flipbook. Click here to read all of the winning sonnets.)
Fire and Ice — Cynthia Erlandson (Royal Oak, Michigan)
Smash Room — Erica Reid (Fort Collins, Colorado)
Palo Colorado Fire, Big Sur 2022 — Laura Schulkind (Carmel, California)
Getting Clean — Jason Sommer (St. Louis, Missouri)
Capricorn — Scott Lowery (Milwaukee, Wisconsin)
Skiing Sonnet — Barbara McAfee (St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin)
On the Death of a Journalist at 44 — David Southward (Milwaukee, Wisconsin)
A Toast from the Musical Nobodies to the Also-Rans — Marilyn Taylor (Madison, Wisconsin)
YOUTH
[entrants high school and under]
The Upward Growth — Susannah Abel-Zucker (Northampton, Massachusetts)
Honorable Mention: Climate Change — Yunzhe Hong (Fontana, California)
Ocean Sonnet— Sachi Tyagi (Fremont, California)
People Love Sad Songs — Allison Xu (Rockville, Maryland)
Tandem — Jeff Balch (Evanston, Illinois)
Tapetum Lucidum — John Beaton (Qualicum Beach, British Columbia, Canada)
To This Day They Won’t Admit It — Charlotte Blair (Utterson, Ontario, Canada)
Ejusdem generis — James Brooks (Signal Mountain, Tennessee)
Longer than timeless waters — Almila Dükel (Muğla, Turkey)
A Bleak Spring Day — Maya Fritz (Chevy Chase, Maryland)
Russian Nesting Dolls — Jonathan Greenhause (Jersey City, New Jersey)
Never Again — Mia Grogan (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
In the County Jail at Natchez — Deborah L. Halliday (Warwick, Rhode Island)
Twenty-one — Michael Harty (Prairie Village, Kansas)
The Math Teacher — Jean Kreiling (Plymouth, Massachusetts)
For a squirrel that did not die in the street — Libby Maxey (Conway, Massachusetts)
The Talk — Rosemarie Moore Morell (Brooklyn, New York)
I can't go out today, please understand — Romy Negrin (New York, New York)
How to Love the Moon — Laura Plummer (Gloucester, Massachusetts)
Big Game — Michael Waterson (Napa, California)