The Lynn DeCaro Contest for Connecticut High School Students
Open to Connecticut student poets in Grades 9-12
All Poems are to be submitted via Submittable.
This contest was set up in memoriam to honor Lynn DeCaro, a promising young CPS member who passed away from leukemia in 1986. It is made possible through the generous support of The Betty and Al DeCaro Family.
- Contest runs from January 1 to March 15
- Send up to 3 unpublished poems, any form, 40 line limit. Only electronic submissions via Submittable will be accepted.
- There is no entry fee for this contest.
- Prizes: $150, $100, 50 will be awarded.
- Do not put any indentifying information on your submission. Submittable will collect that information separate from the actual entry. Failure to leave indentifying information off of the poems will result in elimination from the contest.
- We do not accept work that was in any way created with AI software.
Winners will receive a free one year membership in the Connecticut Poetry Society and recognition in the Connecticut River Review
Margaret Hunt is the Judge for the 2026 Lynn DeCaro Contest
Margaret Hunt earned a BA in English from Smith College and an MAT from Teachers College Columbia University. During her undergraduate years, she studied at Oxford University in England. A high school English teacher for 24 years, she made it her mission to introduce her students to poetry: the reading, the writing, and the performing. During those years, she started poetry clubs, organized slam poetry events, and advised literary magazines for her students.
Since retiring in 2017, she has been a judge for two National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) high school level programs: Recognizing Excellence in Art and Literary Magazines (REALM) and Achievement Awards in Writing. Retirement has given her time to focus on her own poetry. She has participated in Sunken Garden Poetry Festival writing workshops with Billy Collins, Li-Young Lee, Mark Doty, and Vijay Seshadri, and has contributed poems to three anthologies published by Orenaug Mountain Publishing.
The Lynn De Caro Contest Winners 2025
Terry Blackhawk is the Judge for the 2025 Lynn DeCaro Contest
Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk is Founder/Director Emerita (1995-2015) of Detroit’s InsideOut Literary Arts Project, www.insideoutdetroit.org, a writers-in-residence program that encourages youth to think broadly, create bravely, and share their voices with the wider world. Her poetry collections include Escape Artist, winner of the 2002 John Ciardi Prize, and One Less River, a Kirkus Reviews “Top 2019 Indie Poetry Title.” Twice named Michigan Creative Writing Teacher of the Year, Blackhawk has many poems in print and on line with awards that include the Foley Poetry Prize, the Pablo Neruda Prize, and grants from the Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Kresge Arts in Detroit. After retiring from InsideOut, she moved to Hamden to be near her son, Yale Professor Ned Blackhawk, and her grandchildren. Living in Hamden has brought her closer to Amherst and the Emily Dickinson Museum where she has been featured on their Phosphorescence Reading Series and Tell It Slant Festival. She has also served as a Humanities Advisor to “The Slave is Gone – The Podcast that Talks Back to AppleTV’s Dickinson.”
Judge’s Statement on Winners and Entrants
It was a privilege and an honor to spend time with the work of the poets featured in this contest. I enjoyed hearing their voices and was hard pressed to narrow down my choices from the 90 entries. These young poets are no strangers to poetic craft, and I often found myself savoring their skillful work with metaphor, imagery, irony, and nuances of tone. I was also impressed by the poets’ courage in confronting injustice, personal losses, and difficult relationships and inspired by the joy they take in nature, in the people they love, and in poetry itself. Against the backdrop of a country darkened more each day by forces that curtail freedom of expression, these voices ring loud and clear, and if there is a common thread in my selections, it has to do with a spirit of resistance. While their subject matter might be daunting, personally and/or politically, these poets do not succumb. They reach for connectedness and empathy, truth and joy, and their readers are better for it.
FIRST PLACE
Aanum Khan, Loomis Chaffee, Windsor, CT
wish i could do better
(after Fatimah Asghar)
i won’t be the first to go—tinkling bell prep-school
accent makes sure of that. maybe it will be the auntie
who arranges my dinners into constellations & calls
upon the god of everything (even flour) to feed me
starshine. after that it’ll be the uncle at the masjid–
mashallah, you’ve gotten so big, beti—& his gas station.
wish i could do better, wish i could save them, wish i
could, wish i could, wish i could. soon i will drive by
boarded-up polluter stickered with common jasmine
tucked between the liquor store & the lawn sign. i will
pluck the jasmine, crush it under my boot, &
hold back sobs. bad luck to remember the homeland. bad
luck to get sent back there. bad luck to claim it as mine but
these are my people, my people. dragged from the cliff
only to be pushed off—shoved off—promised an orchard,
given a lifeboat parachute malfunctioning administration. glad
it’s not me going first. glad you’ll miss me if not the invisible
ones. these are my people, my people—glad you don’t see me as one of them.
Judge’s comments:
This poem breaks my heart. It’s impossible not to feel the double-edged anguish of a child of immigrants who is protected from possible deportation by privilege and their “tinkling bell prep-school/accent” even as beloved relatives are likely to be “first to go.” The poet conveys the warmth of family with well-chosen, relatable images—an auntie who “arranges my dinners into constellations” or an uncle’s “mashallah, you’ve gotten so big, beti!”—while the intense, run-on syntax with its obsessive repetitions of “wish I could,” “bad luck to,” made me feel, almost viscerally, the panicked heartbeat of one who must “hold back sobs” at the fate awaiting “my people.” The speaker’s symbolic complicity in crushing jasmine “under my boot” as well as the “glad” admission at the end not to be seen “as one of them” underscore the devastation
SECOND PLACE
Yimin Wu, Hall High School, West Hartford, CT
erratic circadian rhythm: alarm clock
Judge’s comments:
It was a pleasure to take this ingenious poem’s circadian ride. The concise, center-justified quatrains give an hour by hour snapshot (8 PM to 3 AM) of the life of a somewhat perplexed teen who, upon waking from a nap, goes about dining on leftovers, doom-scrolling, taking a shower, staring at a google doc—all at the mercy of their devices and their own thoughts. The poet uses telegraphic detail to excellent effect, with humorous touches —“an algorithm puppets me” or “seeds of brainrot sprout/in my head”—alongside serious moments when the speaker is cocooned in “blankets sewn from lies:/“global warming isn’t real” or gets asked by the google doc at 3 AM “if this is the end/or the start of another cycle.” I enjoyed the specificity of images such as “water beads/splatting over marble/tile,” and I like to think that creating the poem has given its author some measure of control over google docs, tiktok, and the phone god. Global warming is, sadly, another matter
THIRD PLACE
Millyhon Stoney, Arts at the Capitol Theater, Willimantic, CT
The Way the Black Girl Sits
The way the black girl sits.
It’s rude, the way she keeps silent.
It’s rude, the way she doesn’t smile.
It’s rude, the way she won’t give any of her time.
It’s rude, the way she watches with spying eyes.
Whose business is she really minding?
(What does she know?)
The way the black girl does nothing.
It’s weird, the way she dresses. (poor / provocative – all one and the same.)
It’s weird, the way she doesn’t react.
It’s weird, the way she won’t loosen up. (never taught how to be proper.)
It’s weird, the way she thinks she’s better than everybody;
Nobody likes arrogance.
(Uptight, loud-mouthed belligerence seen clearly in)
the way the black girl carries herself.
It’s ugly, the way she fixes her hair without a care. (uncontrolled / unruly.)
It’s ugly, the way she doesn’t present like the rest. (evermore unbecoming.)
It’s ugly, the way she won’t cower. (her undefined line between bravery / foolishness.)
It’s ugly, the way her skin looks in the sun.
Could it be easy to draw something out from within her,
even with the way the black girl carries on?
It’s strange, the way she asserts herself (with needless aggression.)
It’s strange, the way she doesn’t lie down and take it.
It’s strange, the way she cries behind closed doors. (wishing and begging.)
It’s strange, the way she fights the war in which there is no winning.
Judge’s comments:
The striking use of anaphora to convey the relentlessness of racial prejudice gives “The Way the Black Girl Sits” its power. Down to the minutest details of behavior, dress, or appearance, the black girl is classified as rude, weird, ugly, strange. The gossipy, picky tone of these remarks (“she doesn’t smile”/“she won’t loosen up”/ “she doesn’t react”) makes me feel as if I am overhearing two or more white girls dishing on the way the black girl breaks social norms. Italicized side comments nod to wider racist tropes and seem to provide back-up for these cruel utterances. I also found myself wondering if the statements might not come from the black girl herself, echoing racist banality and spitting it back at the world. In any case, by the end, the poem lets us know that – far from being strange or ugly — the black girl “asserts herself” and “doesn’t present like the rest” because she “fights the war in which there’s no winning.”
HONORABLE MENTION
Arnisha De, South Windsor High School, South Windsor, CT
it’s not yours
the peach was rotten when i bit into it,
but i swallowed anyway.
sweet first, then sour, then something else,
something closer to rust.
i dream in secondhand memories.
someone else’s childhood, someone else’s house,
a dog i’ve never owned barking at the door.
i wake up feeling misplaced.
there’s a space in my mouth
where a wisdom tooth never grew in.
maybe that’s why i keep making the same mistakes.
even though i know when to leave.
if i close my eyes, i can almost hear
the sound of a voice i never had,
telling me to spit it out,
spit it out,
spit it out.
Judge’s comments:
I enjoyed this terse, lean poem for its surprising images and the authenticity of its voice. Although life and identity present the poet with difficulty and discomfort – eating a rotten peach “anyway,” “feeling misplaced,” “making the same mistakes” – the poem does not succumb. Rather, the speaker analyzes, employing a certain distance and touches of wit to ironic effect. Take the dry, offbeat description of having swallowed what is “sweet first, then sour, then something else/ something closer to rust,” dreaming the barking of “a dog I’ve never owned,” or meditating, punningly, on a missing wisdom tooth. In a wry return to both the title and the rotten peach of the first stanza, the poem “in a voice I never had” instructs the speaker, with three savvy line breaks, “to spit it out/spit it out/spit it out.”
HONORABLE MENTION
Veronica Antov, Taft School, Watertown, CT
Are You Old Enough Yet to Fly Here Alone?
Each time we visited we stayed in the small spare
apartment. A square apartment. A place of familiar
foreign cartoons, cucumbers carved like
metro tunnels, the city between the underground
and the above unfolding and gathering its gentle
murmurs. My grandma folds last summer’s jams
into palachinki she’s fried above the laundry machine.
That’s what it looks like from down here
at least. I am clutching the borders
of this tablecloth, lily-scented and powdery.
I’m just now beginning to understand, but suppose
I fully had then and my penny-rattle giggle
spilled forth a million leva instead and kissed the herbs
set to dry on the windowsill. One day I cried on the white
couch and it spat me back home
for three sterile years. What condition invited this?
Somewhere across the ocean my grandparents
are mailing last summer’s jams to pudge up my palachinki. The ceiling
maw above hums gently: when, when, when.
Judge’s comments:
In a whirl of beauty and dislocation, this poem’s speaker recalls “familiar/foreign” visits to their grandparents’ small apartment in a Slovakian city. There’s a kind of comfy surrealism to the imagery: with “cucumbers carved like/metro tunnels” above the city’s “gentle/murmurs” or the “tablecloth, lily-scented and powdery” that the speaker clutches while pondering their situation. The duality of regret for the present alongside longing for what could have been is enhanced through shifting times and locales—both here, where the speaker has been “spat…back home/for three sterile years,” and there, in the kitchen overseas where the grandmother is still frying “palachinki above the laundry machine.” The insoluble ache is captured beautifully at the end, as the “ceiling/maw above hums gently: when, when, when.”
Past Judges
Pegi Deitz Shea: 2024 Judge
Pegi Deitz Shea is an award-winning author of 17 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction for readers of all ages. A CT Teaching Artist, she’s taught at UCONN, the Mark Twain House, and the Institute of Children’s Literature. She serves on the Board of the CT Council of Poets Laureate, and directs the quarterly series Poetry Rocks.
Vivé Griffith: 2023 Judge
Vivé Griffith is a poet and essayist, a teacher and educational leader and a builder of community. Her work centers on expanding opportunities for intellectual and creative community for a diverse cross-section of individuals and groups. From 2007-2016 she directed Free Minds, an affiliate of the Clemente Course in the Humanities, helping hundreds of adult students jumpstart their college education and explore their academic potential. She continues to work with Free Minds as its professor of creative writing and serves as Academic Director of Alumni Programming for the national Clemente Course. She holds an MFA from the Michener Center at UT Austin, an MA in English from the University of Cincinnati, and a BS in English and Economics from Vanderbilt University. She has taught poetry to everyone from kindergarteners to retirees, trained activists to write advocacy pieces, and was a volunteer mentor in the Veterans Writing Project. Her poetry, nonfiction and journalism have appeared in the Washington Post, The Sun, River Teeth, and Oxford American.
Special Note: Vivé Griffith was a childhood friend of Lynn DeCaro, in whose memory this contest was established. She vividly recalls how they collaborated to solicit sponsorships in their hometown of New Milford, in support of a literary magazine which they launched as a pair of intrepid ten-year olds. CPS is honored to have Vivé Griffith as judge of this year’s Lynn DeCaro competition.
Pit Menousek Pinegar: 2022 Judge
Pit Menousek Pinegar is the author of three books of poetry, Nine Years between Two Poems, The Possibilities of Empty Space, and The Physics of Transmigration .For nearly twenty years, she was a teaching artist at The Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts and The Center for Creative Youth at Wesleyan University, the last several as chair of the Creative Writing Department. She directed the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival’s Urban Outreach Program for eighteen years. Pinegar has received the Governor’s Distinguished Advocate of the Arts Award and an artist’s fellowship in fiction from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts (now the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism). She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize six times and was a double-finalist in the Iron Horse Review’s Single Author Prose Competition. Her essays have been published in The Chicago Tribune, The Hartford Courant, and the Saudi Gazette, among other places. She is, too, a photographer, with special interests in candid portraits of artists and
Julie Choffel: 2020 Judge
Julie Choffel is the Poet Laureate of West Hartford, Connecticut. Her poems have been published in Art New England, American Letters & Commentary, the tiny, The Seattle Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and other places. She is also the author of The Hello Delay, which won the Poets Out Loud Prize, and The Chicories, a chapbook. A graduate of the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at UMass-Amherst, she teaches creative writing at the University of Connecticut.
Laurel S. Peterson: 2019 Judge
Laurel S. Peterson is a Professor of English at Norwalk Community College. Her poetry has been published in many small literary journals. She has two poetry chapbooks: That’s the Way the Music Sounds, from Finishing Line Press (2009) and Talking to the Mirror from The Last Automat Press (2010). She also co-edited a collection of essays on women’s justice titled (Re)Interpretations: The Shapes of Justice in Women’s Experience (2009). Her mystery novel, Shadow Notes, was released by Barking Rain Press (May 2016). A full length collection of poetry, Do You Expect Your Art to Answer You? was released by Futurecycle Press in 2017. She is the current poet laureate of Norwalk, CT.
Brent Terry: 2018 Judge
Brent Terry holds an MFA from Bennington College. His poems, stories, journalism, essays and reviews have appeared in dozens of periodicals. He is the author of the poetry collections, yesnomaybe (Main Street Rag) and Wicked, Excellently (Word Tech). Among the honors he has garnished are a fellowship from the Connecticut Arts and Tourism Board and the 2017 Connecticut Poetry Prize. Terry has worked with writers of all ages and abilities, and currently teaches creative writing and literature at Eastern Connecticut State University.
Annie Barrett: 2017 Judge
Annie Barrett is a poet and a librarian. Her poems have appeared in several journals, including Tiger’s Eye, Common Ground Review, and Connecticut River Review. She has been awarded a writing residency at the Millay Colony for the Arts and she helps coordinate and participates in community readings and arts events such as The Evening of the Spoken Word and Word Art at the Gallery on the Green. Annie has taught literature and composition courses at Northwestern CT Community College, and first-year academic writing at the University of Hartford. One of the things Annie loves about her job at the Canton Public Library is opening the boxes of brand new books
Steven Parlato: 2016 Judge
Novelist and poet Steven Parlato teaches English at Waterbury’s Naugatuck Valley Community College, where he is faculty advisor to award-winning student newspaper, The Tamarack. Steve has played roles ranging from the Scarecrow to Macbeth. His poetry appears in Freshwater, MARGIE, Borderlands, CT River Review, Pirene’s Fountain, and Peregrine. Steven’s young adult novel, The Namesake, won a 2011 Tassy Walden Award.
Upon the novel’s 2013 publication by Merit Press, Publishers Weekly called Parlato “a name to watch.” He leads writing workshops for teens and adults and is available for school and book club visits. Find Steven online at http://www.stevenparlato.com and on Twitter @parlatowrites.
Lisa Mangini: 2015 Judge
Lisa Mangini holds an MFA from Southern Connecticut State University. She is the author of the poetry collection, “Bird Watching at the End of the World,” as well as three chapbooks, all released in 2014. Her work has been featured in McSweeney’s, Weave, 100 Word Story, Words Dance, Silver Birch Press, and others. She is the founding editor of Paper Nautilus, and teaches English composition and creative writing at handful of colleges in southern New England. lisamangini.wordpress.com/