The submission deadline for the Evanston Public Library's Thirty-Eighth Annual Jo-Anne Hirshfield Memorial Poetry Awards is Wednesday, March 9, 2016. The competition is open to all adult and high school age Chicago-area poets, and to all Evanston elementary and middle-school students. Full contest rules and instructions for submissions may be obtained by going to epl.org/poetryawards or by calling the Evanston Public Library at 847-448-8650. 

Prizes will be awarded at a program on Sunday, April 24, 2016, at 2 pm in the Evanston Public Library's Community Meeting Room. Winners will be invited to read their poem at the event which will also include a reading by the poetry judge.

The contest will be judged by John Rybicki (pictured), a Michigan poet and teacher. He has published three books of poetry including his latest, When All the World is Old. He is also the author of two other collections, We Bed Down into Water and Traveling at High Speeds. His prose and poetry have appeared in Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Field Triquarterly, Ecotone, and in The Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Rybicki teaches poetry writing in Detroit schools through the InsideOut Literary Arts Project.