Author Description

For the 2023 Poetry Challenge, participants were given three options: write about Architecture (recognizing the 300th Anniversary of the death of Sir Christopher Wren, famed architect of London's St. Paul's Cathedral), Flowers, or write a poem on any subject in the form of an Imayo, a Japanese poetic form. The imayo is a 4-line poem that has twelve syllables in each line with a planned caesura or pause between the first seven syllables and final five. Poems were selected by our guest judges. British poet Tina Cole judged all the poems about architecture. Texas poet Sylvia Riojas Vaughn made the selections for flowers. New York poet, photographer and dancer Natalia Rudychev chose the imayo poems.