The Faulkner–Wisdom Competition is administered every year by the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society in New Orleans. In 2023, 2024, and 2026 Lavender Ink has partnered with the society to publish the winners in the poetry manuscript category. 2027 Guidelines will post at the site when the competition opens.
2025-26 Poetry Manuscript Winner
Benjamin Aleshire, for his manuscript Poems for Bystanders forthcoming Fall 2027.
Ben was born and raised in Rutland County, VT. For some year he made his living by writing poems for strangers on a manual typewriter in the streets of New Orleans, Paris, Havana, and San Francisco. His writing has been published in The Times of London, Iowa Review, Southern Review, and an excerpt of his novel in progress Poet for Hire was featured at Lit Hub. A first-gen student, Ben is the recipient of a James Merrill fellowship from the VT Studio Center, a Bread Loaf waiter-scholarship, a Creation Grant from the VT Arts Council, and a Goldwater Fellowship from NYU. His debut full-length collection Poems for Bystanders was a finalist for prizes from Sarabande, Alice James, FourWay Books, and others. Currently he serves as Creative Director at Aleshire Gallery, a photography cooperative in Brandon, VT. Visit his websites at: www.aleshiregallery.com and www.poetforhire.org
Judge’s comment on Poems for Bystanders:
The seemingly new figure of the “typewriter poet” actually grows out of a much older tradition, that of the Troubadours, itinerate poet/musicians who traveled in Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries, making their living by providing spontaneous compositions for anyone who asked for one. These poems retain the intimacy of a Troubadour improvisation, responding as they do to a specific time, place and situation, and to a specific listener. But this collection also shows a familiarity with the form, practiced (according to the introduction) over hundreds of iterations, and responds with great craft to the deep cultural need we feel to return poetry to its personal roots.
2023 Poetry Manuscript Winner
Dennis Formento, for Phaeton’s Wheel, published in 2024.
Dennis lives in Slidell, Louisiana, USA, Mississippi bioregion, on Chahtah land near Bayou Bonfouca,. His books include Spirit Vessels (FootHills Publishing, 2018) Looking for An Out Place (FootHills, 2010,) and Cineplex (Paper Press, 2014.) He edited Mesechabe: The Journal of Surregionalism, 1991-2001. He collaborates locally with musicians (from 2001 – 2004 with his own Frank Zappatistas free jazz/free verse project,) and in Italy with renowned “avant-folk” group Duo Bottasso. Dennis was a founding member of the world-wide poetry network, 100,000 Poets for Change, and has organized readings in New Orleans and St. Tammany Parish since 2011.
About the book:
In a formal sense, these poems have an experimental quality, like the writer is performing experiments, which puts it always on the edge, as to whether the poem will get whatever the hypothesis is to wherever it needs to get to, to succeed. Hence risky. It isn’t like a lot of poetry where clever observations are strung together into a climax. Creeley, say, wrote largely by “hypothesis,” but Creeley is about reserve, and pinpoint focus, whereas these poems are usually more dispersed. One gets a sense of the poet being open during a poem to just about anything incoming, including surrealistic energy, historical events and dreams, friendships and the culture of New Orleans, its music, poetry and activism. In the end it often creates a kind of untamed yet genuine and finished poem, usually aesthetically complex. “I think everybody must already know this,” says Bernadette Mayer in a 1992 interview, “—I hope they do—that one person can write in many different ways.”
2022 Poetry Manuscript Winner
Chad Foret, for Scenes from a Rain Country, published in 2023
Chad Foret’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has placed or been a finalist in competitions and with publications such as Frontier (judged by Tyhimba Jess), New South, Palette (judged by Shane McRae), Spoon River Poetry Review (judged by Li-Young Lee), the Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize, Blair / Carolina Wren Poetry Prize (judged by Ada Limon), and Tennessee Williams Poetry Contests (judged by Peter Cooley). Individual poems have also appeared in Best New Poets, CutBank, Electric Literature, Prime Number Magazine, Bayou Magazine, Nashville Review, The Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, Crab Creek Review, Flock, Spoon River Poetry Review, Barely South Review, The Pedestal Magazine, Louisiana Literature, New Rivers Press, and other journals and anthologies. He grew up in the towns of Independence and St. Amant, Louoisiana, and often draws inspiration from those childhood memories and relationships. He currently works as a freelance writer, technical editor, and proofreader with experience editing and formatting renewable energy and energy-efficiency research reports; editing UI-UX, cybersecurity, and marketing learning materials; and reviewing learning resources for SEO optimization. Prior to this work, he was a university instructor and editor. Some of his favorite writers and artists are James Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, Mary Ruefle, Frank O’Hara, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, Frank Stanford, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Umberto Boccioni, and David Lynch, and he has tried to incorporate some elements of their work in his own. He enjoys reading, writing poetry, movie marathons, and drawing, but his favorite thing is spending time and adventuring with his wife and best friend Audrey, who almost always ends makes an appearance in his poems.
About the book:
Scenes from a Rain Country explores the experiences and interior lives of people, wildlife, and places in Louisiana, with occasional visits to other locations, like Cleveland, Chile, and distant nebulae. The familiar and fantastic intersect as these poems disclose and disorient the entanglements of hurricanes and horse shadows, astronauts and plant taxonomy, octopus hearts and the moon.
“It’s so rare for me to leave the last page of a poetry collection completely challenged and energized like I’ve had a jolt of caffeine. Chad Foret’s debut collection, Scenes from a Rain Country, is exactly that kind of read. These poems whisk us across worlds, around the globe, from the ideal to the football field, and through myriads of philosophical stances and visions with limitless energy and depth. These lines pry and they sing. They clarify and confound in the best possible ways. Ghosts on the Danube, movie stars in the desert, touchdowns, fossils, floods, hog’s blood, and moons—it all shines in these poems. More than a gallery of the absurd and eclectic, though, Scenes from a Rain Country is a tour of connections and of the sublime. I cannot imagine spending time with these poems and not feeling better for having read them.” —Jack B. Bedell, Poet Laureate, State of Louisiana, 2017-2019, and author of Color All Maps New.
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