NYC Parks Department Announces 2nd Annual Freshkills Haiku Contest

The NYC Parks Department announces this year's second annual Haiku contest winners. More than 40 poets participated over the course of National Poetry Month this April. Last year, three park poets were awarded prizes for their submissions and had their three-lined poems featured on the Freshkills Park Blog and across the web. This year's winners will receive a limited edition Freshkills Park hat and their works will be posted in the Freshkills newsletter. The winning entries are provided below:

Adult winners:

Quietly sleeping,
Buried discards of past years
Support vibrant hills
- Stephen Knowles

Now green and growing
This upside-down museum
Forms new paths of hope
- Leona Egan

Tall thousand grasses
rub hollow elbows to the
chopstick cricket legs
- Robin Locke Monda

Student winners:

Looking at the mounds,
you are rolling down the past.
Future brings us new
- Lauren Seaquist, age 14

The 2010 judges included distinguished and published writers. Melissa Broder is the author of When You Say One Thing But Mean Your Mother and the chief editor of La Petite Zine . By day, she is a publicity manager at Penguin. Nancy Hechinger is a professor at NYU in the Interactive Telecommunications Program, where she has been teaching an experimental course called Writing and Reading Poetry in the Digital Age. Her poetry has been published in the Red Wheelbarrow, Salamander, Pirene's Fountain, and in the next issue of The New York Quarterly. Donna Masini is the author of two books of poems-Turning to Fiction, and That Kind of Danger. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies. In addition, Masini is a recipient of an NEA, NYFA, a Pushcart Prize. She is an Associate Professor of English at Hunter College and teaches in the MFA Creative Writing program.

To learn more about Freshkills Park and to stay up to date on the latest news, visit the Freshkills Park Blog at www.freshkillspark.wordpress.com