By Mira Crane ’27 and Isabel Dunn ’27
Contributing Writer | Staff Writer
Every year, Mount Holyoke College hosts an event to celebrate student poetry. “It's so exciting to get to share my work, and to meet all these great people from different universities and hear everyone's work,” Mount Holyoke contestant Aderet Fishbane ’25, said, speaking about the College’s 101st Annual Glascock Poetry Competition.
Image courtesy of Shana Hansell
Glascock is traditionally composed of three events. The first event, on the afternoon of Friday the 29th, was a conversation with the judges of the contest: Jennifer Tamayo, Samuel Ace and Margaret Rhee, all poets and authors themselves. Attendees gathered in the Stimson Room on the sixth floor of the Williston Memorial Library to listen to the poets discuss topics ranging from the role of transformation in the judges’ work, their work with other media in connection to their poetry and to understand how they seek out community.
Samuel Ace, a former professor in the English department at Mount Holyoke, discussed being cognizant of the limits of the institutions you are in and building a space safe enough inside yourself to be able to put it all down on paper. Tamayo discussed her focus on the return of Indigenous land, Indigenous sovereignty and the end of the carceral state, while Rhee discussed the idea of sustaining communities and maintaining accessibility and openness.
There were about 30 people at the event, and the audience was engaged in the discussion. In the question-and-answer portion, the audience asked judges questions like: Does poetry as resistance work? How do you engage with the line between the self and the community when writing poetry? And how do you deal with people not always understanding the intent of your poetry?
The judges answered by speaking about the way they see their work, the world and the role of their writing.
The second night was the main event of the Glascock Contest: the contestant readings. Professor Andrea Lawlor provided an opening statement in which they thanked the Glascock committee for their work on the event and praised the Glascock contest as a meeting of student poets and poets “in the wild.”
Each contestant read a selection of poems. Riley Bowen, a student from UMass Amherst, took the microphone first. Bowen read seven short poems. Brittni Braswell of Brown University went next, reading five selections that played with wording on the page. Following Braswell was Sambhavi Dwivedi, a student from Rutgers University.
Fishbane, the Mount Holyoke representative, had a shorter selection of poems and opened with a statement about how their work was rooted in their experiences as a Jewish American student.
“These pieces and I are looking for a better future and a better way to survive, and also looking for greater dignity and empathy in a moment where those things are really hard to ask for,” Fishbane said in an email to Mount Holyoke News. "I’m trying to deal with this militant survivalism which I feel is suffocating American Jewish identity and also, more importantly, destroying the people of Gaza and Palestinian futures right now."
The audience was moved to laughter by the humor in Fishbane’s poems. Erin Grier of Spelman College read five poems, and Eva Lynch of McGill University finished the night off with three readings. Professor Kate Singer of the English Department closed the event by thanking the poets and the attendees for their time, and by recommending that everyone attend the event the following day.
At the last event, the judges were reintroduced, this time by members of the student committee, and each read a selection of some of their poems. Rhee opened the readings with some selections from her collection “Love, Robot.” She then transitioned to a novel in verse she is working on that discusses climate change and queerness. To wrap things up, she read a lighthearted poem called “This is How You Make Love to a Robot.”
Tamayo followed their introduction with a passionate reading of a poem from their collection, “Bruise, Bruise, Break.” They read another short poem from the collection before introducing their latest project: A book in four parts that explores different versions of Dora the Explorer. They closed with a poem from the collection called “Dora the Dogfucker,” which explored race, community, sexuality and desire.
Ace began with a poem from his book, “Our Weather, Our Sea,” called “I finally made it through the birds the birds.” He then read a poem called “Home in Three Days Don’t Wash.” After that, he introduced a new work, a collaborative piece. He ended by reading some excerpts from his work, “I want to start by saying.”
Afterward, they announced the runner-up, Fishbane, and the winner, Braswell stated, “I’m really thankful obviously to the judges and to the other poets who were also incredible contestants. It was really great seeing everyone’s work and to absorb everyone’s different styles and perspectives.”