Entry deadline – Monday, March 3, 2025

Entries accepted in 7 age categories:

• Adult
• High School students
• 4th-8th grade students

Three winners will be selected in each age category.

To enter, download and print the entry form. Please mail entries to Amy Brockman, SWIC Student Life, 2500 Carlyle Ave., Belleville, IL 62221 or hand deliver to SWIC Red Bud Campus, Student Development Office, Room 175.

The Red Bud Campus Poetry Contest Awards Ceremony will be held on Tuesday, April 15 at 6 p.m. in the Performing Arts Room at SWIC Red Bud Campus, 500 W. South 4th Street, Red Bud, IL

About our contest judges:

Melany Nitsche lives in St. Louis, Missouri. She holds a bachelor’s degree in literature from Webster University and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in creative writing and literature through the Extension School at Harvard University. She has been a member of the Heartland Women’s Writers Guild for 24 years. The Guild co-authored the book Orchids in the Cornfield in 2004. Her poetry has also appeared in Amoskeag: the Journal of Southern New Hampshire University and Cantos: A Literary and Arts Journal. She is currently working on her first novel.

Pat Robert lives in Red Bud, Illinois. She has been an English and reading teacher for many years and taught at Red Bud Elementary for 16 years before retiring in May of 2006. She has been writing poetry since she was very young and still loves the first poem she ever wrote.  She and members of the Heartland Women’s Writers Guild co-authored the anthology, Orchids in the Cornfield, in 2005.

For more information contact the Red Bud Campus Site Director at lori.murphy@swic.edu or the Director of Student Life at amy.brockman@swic.edu.