Educators (current or retired) are encouraged to submit a full-length poetry manuscript for the Dryden/Vreeland Poetry Prize. Publication, $1000 and 10 author copies. Your poems need not focus on schools or teaching. Send your manuscript via Submittable between May 1 and August 30 for consideration.
2025 Award: Final Judge, Marsha de la O
Gunpowder Press is honored to announce that the final judge for the 2025 Dryden-Vreeland Prize will be Marsha de la O. A long-time educator, she is currently a lecturer in the English Department at CSU Channel Islands, where she teaches poetry and creative writing. She is the award-winning author of Every Ravening Thing, Antidote for Night, and Black Hope. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Slowdown, and many other journals, and she is a recipient of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize. She lives with her husband in Ventura, California, where they founded the Ventura County Poetry Project to support local poetry.
2023 Award
In 2023, final judge Nan Cohen selected Christopher Blackman as the inaugural winner of the Dryden-Vreeland Book Prize for his manuscript Three-Day Weekend. His book was released by Gunpowder Press in 2024. Seven other poets were selected as finalists:
- Jasmine Marshall Armstrong, The School Custodian’s Daughter
- Kirsten Casey, Grieving Birds
- Nicelle Davis, Ars/Ours
- James Dickson, Hoping to Embrace the Moon
- Alicia Hoffman, You Are Browsing as a Guest
- Barry Peters, The Cohesion of Fizz
- Jessica Purdy, Lung Hours
Nan Cohen is the author of Unfinished City, published by Gunpowder Press as the Michael Dryden Prize winner in 2017.
About the Prize
Gunpowder Press editors David Starkey and Chryss Yost named this prize to honor two high school teachers who made an impact on them: Michael Dryden and Susan Vreeland. Michael Dryden taught English at Foothill High School in Sacramento in the 1970s and 80s. Susan Vreeland taught at University City High in San Diego before becoming a best-selling author.