Freshkills 2013 Haiku Contest Winners
April was National Poetry Month, and to celebrate, we asked fans of Freshkills Park to submit a haiku inspired by the park. We split the entries into two categories, Adult and Youth, and our judges selected three Adult winners and two Youth winners.
Adult Winners:
Our apologies
are returned by mother earth
with much forgiveness
-Sanchie Bobrow
As a child, I dreamed
of playing in the fields where
the great white trucks roamed
-Sanchie Bobrow
Coyote roams wild,
Man-made meadow under paw,
From lost kills he drinks.
-Frank Williams
Youth Winners:
Walking on the path
Life flourishes everywhere
How can you not smile?
-Caitlin Samargian, 12
Freshkills was a dump
Now turning into a park
That’s safe and healthy
-Samantha Chierchia, 11
The Freshkills Park Team would like to thank all who entered our contest, as well as our judges:
Ned Vizzini is the bestselling author of the acclaimed young-adult books The Other Normals, It’s Kind of a Funny Story, Be More Chill, and Teen Angst? Naaah…. In television, he has written for ABC’s Last Resort and MTV’s Teen Wolf. His essays and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, the Daily Beast, and Salon. He is the co-author, with Chris Columbus, of the fantasy-adventure series House of Secrets. His work has been translated into ten languages. He grew up in New York and attended Stuyvesant High School and Hunter College.
Marguerite María Rivas is a poet and scholar whose work has been published in such journals as The Americas Review, Earth’s Daughters, Waterways: Poetry in the Mainstream, and Short, Fast, and Deadly, among many others. A native Staten Islander whose poetry and prose is often Staten Island-centric, she is widely regarded as the de facto Poet Laureate of Staten Island. The author of Tell No One: Poems of Witness (Chimbarazu Press 2012), Rivas is an Associate Professor of English at The City University of New York and holds a Doctor of Letters in English from Drew University.
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, & in The New York Quarterly.
