O’Hara Prize Winners’ Reading

Join the winners of the WCPA’s 2024 Annual Poetry Contest: The Frank O’Hara Prize for a reading of their work and the work of contest judge Dennis Barone. There will also be an opportunity to mingle over refreshments. The reading will start at 4:00 pm US/Eastern.

First Prize – Paul Szlosek is a poet born in Southbridge, Massachusetts, but currently resides in the nearby metropolis of Worcester. He was co-founder and host of the long-running Poet’s Parlor poetry reading in Southbridge and Sturbridge and a past recipient of the Jacob Knight Award for Poetry. In May 2019, Paul started a brand new open mic and featured poetry reading series with poet Ron Whittle called The Poetorium at Starlite (also in Southbridge), which closed in March 2020 due to COVID, but reopened recently in June 2022 (in the two-year interim, he ran an online print version entitled The Virtual Poetorium which he continues under the name The International Imaginarium For Word & Verse). Szlosek was named 2023’s Kunitz Medalist by the Worcester County Poetry Association. His poetry has appeared in various local & national print & online publications, including The Worcester Review, Worcester Magazine, Radius, Sahara, Concrete Wolf, Soul-Lit, and Diner. He’s probably best known in the Central Massachusetts poetry community for his fanatical obsession with obscure poetry forms, and has invented his own, including the ziggurat, the streetbeatina, the hodgenelle, the lux, and the singsangsong, which he often shares with readers on his poetry blog Paul’s Poetry Play Ground.

Second Prize – Claire Schaeffer-Duffy, along with their husband Scott, is a founding member of the SS. Francis and Therese Catholic Worker, a lay community in Worcester, MA, that offers hospitality to men and women in need and engages in a variety of works for peace and justice. The community publishes The Catholic Radical, to which Claire contributes. Claire began writing as a freelance journalist for the National Catholic Reporter in 2000, a pursuit that has allowed her to satisfy her wanderlust. Her profiles, features, and investigative stories have garnered several awards from the Catholic Press Association. You can find her book reviews in America magazine. She and Scott are the happy parents of four children and grandparents of six. The couple still logs their miles as long-distance runners, although lately, Claire is thinking about taking up the ukulele.

Third Prize – Art DuBois is a 67-year-old career clinical social worker who has worked as a psychotherapist in the public defender’s office and in management positions in the human services field. He is an amateur nature photographer and intermittent poet. He counts Mary Oliver as his main inspiration, and his poetry is heavily influenced by his mindfulness practices and his work in helping others. Art resides in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, and is married to his wife, Susan. Together they have three children: Sam, 30; Annie, 27; and Joey, 23.

Honorable Mention – Matt Zingg Matt Zingg is a high school English teacher in central Massachusetts with a master’s degree in English literature from Framingham State University. He spends his spare time writing poems and stories, painting, playing and writing music, and hiking outside with his dog, Ralph, and his wife, Brittany.

Contest Chairperson Joe Fusco Jr. and WCPA Administrator Irena Kaci will moderate the ceremony.

Contest Judge Dennis Barone is the author of seven short fiction books, including On the Bus: Selected Stories (Blaze Vox, 2012). He is also the author of two novellas, Temple of the Rat (Left Hand Books, 2000) and God’s Whisper (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005), and the author of a collection of prose poems, The Walls of Circumstance (Avec Books, 2004). Bordighera Press published his study of Italian-American narrative America / Trattabili in 2011. Barone is editor of Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), New Hungers for Old: One-Hundred Years of Italian-American Poetry (Star Cloud Press, 2011), and Garnet Poems: An Anthology of Connecticut Poetry Since 1776 (Wesleyan University Press, 2012). Left Hand Books published his selected poems volume one, Separate Objects, in 1998, and Shearsman Books published volume two entitled Parallel Lines in 2011. In 2015 Quale Press published his mixed genre book Sound / Hammer, and in 2016 the SUNY Press published his study Beyond Memory: Italian Protestants in Italy and America. In 2017 Bordighera Press published his book Second Thoughts, a work of short fictions and prose poems. Also, in 2017, he received the inaugural Sister Mary Ellen Murphy Faculty Scholarship Award at the University of Saint Joseph. In 2018, Blaze Vox published Frame Narrative, a book of poetry, and in 2022, the mixed-genre book, A Field Guide to the Rehearsal. His newest book is After Math from Cyber Wit. A graduate of Bard College, he received his Ph.D. in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Saint Joseph. Currently, he serves as the Poetry Editor for the Wallace Stevens Journal and President of the Hartford Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens.

Please join us for what is always a fun and inspiring event.