The winning poets (clockwise from top): Gretchen Fletcher, Joshua Rivkin, Timothy Donnelly, Steven Alvarez, Simone Muench

Click the titles below to read the 5 winning poems:

& SO TIO & CHALEY - Steven Alvarez

MY FUNNY VALENTINE - Timothy Donnelly

TWO GIANT MEN IN NEW YORK - Gretchen Fletcher

HER DREAMING FEET - Simone Muench

IN PRAISE OF WHAT WILL NOT LAST - Joshua Rivkin

WHAT: A poetry reading celebrating Times Square, and the qualities that Times Square represents—diversity, desire, dynamism and the marriage of commerce and culture.

WHEN: Monday, June 23rd at 6:30pm.

WHERE: At the intersection of Broadway and 7th Avenue between 43rd and 44th Streets.

ADMISSION: FREE

The Poetry Society of America and the Times Square Alliance congratulate the five winners of Bright Lights Big Verse: Poems of Times Square, the first-ever national contest for poetry inspired by Times Square. On June 23rd, we proudly showcased their work at the Crossroads of the World, together with readings by distinguished poets Kimiko Hahn, Bob Holman, Tracie Morris and Philip Schultz.

The five winners, selected from a pool of close to 700 entrants, include Steven Alvarez from New York, NY, for “& So Tio & Chaley”; Simone Muench from Chicago, IL, for “her dreaming feet”; Timothy Donnelly from Brooklyn, NY, for “My Funny Valentine”; Gretchen Fletcher from Ft. Lauderdale, FL, for “Two Giant Men in New York”; and Joshua Rivkin from San Francisco, CA, for “In Praise of What Will Not Last”. Each winner will receive $1,000, plus a trip to New York City in June for a free outdoor public reading of their prize-winning work in the heart of Times Square on Monday, June 23rd at 6:30pm.

The five prize-winning pieces represent Times Square experiences and impressions as disparate and diverse as their authors – from a father’s visit to the wartime Times Square of the 1940s to a family’s unlikely choice of Times Square as a place to scatter an uncle’s ashes to a poem about love, heartache, movie theaters and Ella Fitzgerald.

“The response to this first-ever Times Square poetry contest has been truly outstanding,” said Tim Tompkins, President of the Times Square Alliance, “We received hundreds of fascinating and diverse visions of Times Square from so many talented poets – it’s really a testament to this neighborhood’s ability to provoke strong emotional reactions of every kind, to evoke vivid memories and, above all, to inspire creativity.”

The event was emceed by Alice Quinn, the executive director of the Poetry Society of America and former poetry editor at The New Yorker.  A group of distinguished guest poets was on-hand to read their favorite New York-themed poems. These celebrated readers included Philip Schultz, recipient of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his book of most recent book of poems, Failure; Kimiko Hahn, the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts; Tracie Morris, the crowned champion of both the Nuyorican Poetry Grand Slam and the National Haiku Slam; and Bob Holman, Bowery Poetry Club founder.

THE JUDGES:

David Lehman is the author of six collections of poems, including When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005). His most recent book of criticism is The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Doubleday, 1998). He is the Series Editor of The Best American Poetry, and the General Editor of the University of Michigan Press's "Poets on Poetry" Series, and has also edited Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present and the most recent edition of The Oxford Book of American Poetry. Lehman's honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts; an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award. He teaches in the graduate writing program at the New School.

Tracie Morris is an interdisciplinary poet who has worked extensively as a sound artist, writer and multimedia performer. Her installations have been presented at the Whitney Biennial and the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning. Tracie is the recipient of numerous awards for poetry and performance and has contributed to, and been written about in, several anthologies of literary criticism. She holds an MFA in poetry from Hunter College and a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University. Dr. Morris is currently Visiting Professor of English at Temple University and the CPCW Fellow in Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

Alice Quinn is the Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America and the Editor of Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). She served for many years as the Poetry Editor at The New Yorker as well as at Alfred A. Knopf. Quinn teaches at Columbia University's School of the Arts.