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Sister Maura Eichner Award for Young Poets

Named in honor of poet, teacher and alumna, Maura Eichner, SSND '41, Notre Dame's prestigious award celebrates aspiring young female poets nationwide.

 

About the Competition

The competition is conducted annually and open to all young women, ages 14-18, who are enrolled in a secondary school in the U.S. The first prize winner receives $500. Prizes are also be awarded for second place ($300) and third place ($100). All winners have their poems featured in Damozel, Notre Dame's literary magazine.

2012-13 Competition Winners
Contest Judge, Cate Marvin

Click here to read the full remarks of our contest judge and the winning poems.

Katherine Way headshotFirst Prize

Katherine Way from Yorktown High School in Arlington, VA for her poem “On Beating a Rabbit to Death With My Bare Hands.”

Cate Marvin, Contest Judge: "This is a poem that can only exist in the imagination and it is brave in that it enacts violence and is, in fact, very unpleasant. The poem is less about cruelty to an animal than the speaker’s rage, and the vehicle he or she seeks to express it. It’s very active and visual, very smart." 

Second Prize
Bindu Bansinath from Stuart Country Day School of the Sacred Heart in Princeton, NJ, for her poem “Anahi.”

Third Prize
Margaret Wright, also from Stuart Country Day School of the Sacred Heart in Princeton, NJ, for her poem “This Is My Computer Poem.”

Finalists (in alphabetical order):

Summara Abaid Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, Baltimore, MD
Amanda Gaylord Yorktown High School, Arlington, VA
Grace Gibbons Mercy High School, Baltimore, MD
Hannah Simon Goldman Sycamore High School, Cincinnati, OH
Julia A. Gusmano Mercy High School, Baltimore, MD
Jordan Isaacs York Preparatory, New York, NY
Claudia Lee Egg Harbor Township High School, NJ
Grace Lide Academy of the Holy Cross, Rockville, MD
Madeline Pages Yorktown High School, Arlington, VA
Caitlyn Rayman Notre Dame Preparatory, Baltimore, MD

Cate Marvin, 2012 Eichner Award Judge

Cate Marvin’s first book, World’s Tallest Disaster, was chosen by Robert Pinksy for the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize and published by Sarabande Books in 2001. In 2002, she received the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize. Her second book of poems, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, for which she received a Whiting Award, was published by Sarabande in 2007. Marvin teaches poetry writing in Lesley University’s Low-Residency M.F.A. Program and Columbia University’s MFA Program and is an associate professor in creative writing at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. In 2009, she co-founded the nonprofit organization VIDA: Women in Literary Arts with poet Erin Belieu. Her third book of poems, A Trembling, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton & Co. in 2013.