Freshkills Park 2012 Haiku Contest winners

05.03.12

It is time to announce the winners of our fourth annual Freshkills Park Haiku Contest! 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:

In beholders’ eyes,
Beauty born from lesser things,
A park is risen.

-Nicholas Martini

A goose heading north
“Look what they’ve done to Freshkills”
Migration can wait

-Francis Doehner

Bleak, black land, turned green
Lost animals return home
Second chance for man

-Tom Donegan

Youth winners:

Which once was soiled
Now brings out nature’s light here
Orange, pink, and white

-Anisa Lett

Trashy to fancy
I can go horseback riding
Extraordinary

-Kamy Kempton

Congratulations! Thanks to all who participated, and to our judges:

Cynthia Cruz is the author of Ruin (Alice James Books) and The Glimmering Room (Four Way Books). She is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. Her poems have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Boston Review, American Poetry Review, and Kenyon Review among other journals. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Nina Darnton has lived and worked in Nigeria, served as Publications Director for the Untied Nations Environment Program (UNEP) in Nairobi, Kenya, been special correspondent for Newsweek and National Public Radio in Warsaw, Poland during the rise of the Solidarity movement, and a feature writer for the New York Times in Madrid, Spain. Back in New York in the 80’s and 90’s, she was an Arts and Leisure writer and movie columnist for the New York Times, chief movie writer for the New York Post, staff writer and fashion critic for Newsweek, and an on-air essayist for the McNeil/Lehrer News Hour. She has written for many monthly magazines including More, Elle, Travel and Leisure and House and Gardens. Viking published her first novel, An African Affair, in 2011, which will be available in paperback this summer. She is currently working on a new novel.

Maya Rock is a writer and editor. She has two young adult novels forthcoming from Penguin Putnam and her journalism work has appeared in Marie Claire and the Writer magazine. She began literary agenting at Writers House in 2005; there she edited and sold nonfiction, pop culture, memoir, and young adult fiction. In 2010, she left Writers House to pursue a full-time freelance writing and editing career.

Tags: art, Freshkills Park