Past winners

Winners Aquillrelle Contest 1

Winners Aquillrelle Contest 2

Winners Aquillrelle Contest 1

M. Lee Alexander

M. Lee Alexander’s work has appeared in a variety of journals including The MacGuffin, Litchfield Review, Niederngasse, and Eleventh Muse. Her poems have won prizes including Finalist for the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Award 2005, 1st Honorable Mention Yeats Society Poetry Award, 2007, short-listed for Bridport Prize 2008, and winner of the Yeovil Literary Prize 2009 for which the judge was current UK Poet Laureate Carol Anne Duffy. She’s performed her poetry sometimes with jazz accompaniment in DC and the mid-Atlantic region. Her chapbook Observatory was published by Finishing Line Press in 2007 and her second book Folly Bridge is in process. She teaches creative writing at William and Mary and resides in Williamsburg, Virginia.

40 years a poet, from a time hippies and anti-war rage, from a time when a child becomes an artist not for the money but because the universe and beauty called. though broken and disabled he more then survives. a poet doesn't just write, he lives his art.

Former college president Dr. Lynn Veach Sadler has published widely in academics and creative writing. Editor, poet, fiction/creative nonfiction writer, and playwright, she has published four chapbooks; has two more and a full-length collection in press; and won The Pittsburgh Quarterly’s Hay Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Hemley Award, and Asphodel’s Poetry Contest and tied for first place in Kalliope’s Elkind Contest. One story appears in Del Sol’s Best of 2004 Butler Prize Anthology; another, about Patrick Swayze, won the 2006 Abroad Writers Contest/Fellowship (France). A novel will soon join her novella and short-story collection, and she was named 2007 Writer of the Year by California’s elizaPress. She won the 2009 overall award (poetry and fiction) of the San Diego City College National Writer’s Contest and City Works Journal. A play on Frost was a Pinter Review Prize for Drama Silver Medalist, and she won the 2008 Pearson Award at Wayne State for Second-Time-Around, a play on the Iraq wars. She has traveled around the world five times, writing all the way, and now works full-time as a creative writer and an editor.

Winners Aquillrelle Contest 2

Earl LeClaire

M. Lee Alexander’s work has appeared in a variety of journals including The MacGuffin, Litchfield Review, Niederngasse, and Eleventh Muse. Her poems have won prizes including Finalist for the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Award 2005, 1st Honorable Mention Yeats Society Poetry Award, 2007, short-listed for Bridport Prize 2008, and winner of the Yeovil Literary Prize 2009 for which the judge was current UK Poet Laureate Carol Anne Duffy. She’s performed her poetry sometimes with jazz accompaniment in DC and the mid-Atlantic region. Her chapbook Observatory was published by Finishing Line Press in 2007 and her second book Folly Bridge is in process. She teaches creative writing at William and Mary and resides in Williamsburg, Virginia.

George Amabile has published his poetry, fiction and non -fiction in the USA, Canada, Europe, England, Wales, South America, Australia and New Zealand in over a hundred anthologies, magazines, journals and periodicals including The New Yorker, The New Yorker Book of Poems, Harper's, Poetry (Chicago), American Poetry Review, Botteghe Oscure, The Globe and Mail, The Malahat Review, The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse, Saturday Night, Poetry Australia, Sur (Buenos Aires), Poetry Canada Review, Canadian Literature, and Margin (England). Born in Jersey City, N. J. he holds an A. B.(Hons) from Amherst College; an M. A. (Univ. of Minnesota) and a Ph. D. in English Literature (Univ. of Connecticut). He was Writer in Residence at University of British Columbia for 1969-70, co-founder and editor of The Far Point, founder and editor of Northern Light, has edited a dozen titles for Nuage Editions, Signature Editions, Penguin and has published eight books. The Presence of Fire (McClelland & Stewart, 1982), won the CAA National Prize for literature; his long poem, Durée, placed third in the CBC Literary Competition for 1991; "Popular Crime" won first prize in the Sidney Booktown International Poetry Contest in February, 2000; "Road to the Sky" received an honorable mention National Magazine Award for 2000, "What We Take with Us, Going Away" was shortlisted for the CBC Literary Prize in 2003 and he is the subject of a special issue of Prairie Fire, (Vol. 21, No. 1, May 2000). From October 2000 to April 2001 he was Writer in Residence at the Winnipeg Public library. "Dimuendo" was awarded third prize in the Petra Kenney International Poetry Competition for 2005 and "A Raft of Lilies" won second place in the MAC national poetry contest, "Friends" (2007). He has performed his poems on the CBC, at numerous venues in Canada and the USA, and at the Olympics in Montreal His most recent publications are Rumours of Paradise / Rumours of War (McClelland and Stewart, 1995) and Tasting the Dark: New and Selected Poems (The Muses Company, an imprint of Gordon J. Shillingford Publishing, 2001). A long poem, Dancing, with Mirrors, will be published in 2011 by Porcupine’s Quill.

Elijah Guo is in his fourth year at UC Berkeley. He has published short stories and poetry in local literary magazines and contests. As a playwright, he has written The True Story of Aladdin, produced by Ariel Dance Productions in Spring 2009, Hamilton and Burr, read by American Conservatory Theater in Fall 2009, The Business Cycle, to be produced this fall, and will adapt Robert Hass’ Time and Materials at UC Berkeley next spring. As a screenwriter, he has written and directed a few films. In whatever free time he has left, he enjoys loving and losing, raging against the dying of the light, taking the path less travelled, and those sorts of things.

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