Volume 4, Issue 1 December 2016

Poetry as Resistance: Our Contest Issue Letter from the Poetry Editor

Dearest Readers,
 
We are thrilled to present our 2016 Tinderbox Poetry Prize finalists & winners. These twelve stunning poets ferried us into their worlds built of strength, resilience, pain, sometimes strangeness, sometimes healing, & always deeply felt truths.
 
Of Norma Liliana Valdez’s first-place poem “Tepoztlán Blues,” judge Eduardo C. Corral describes as “alive, jumpy, & brightly phrased.” We love how this poem sings its resistance—swallows it whole. Indeed, every single one of the poems in this Contest Issue came alive for us both in form & content, drawing us into mystery & holding us with surprising new ways of seeing & feeling.
 
This winter, many poets are taking to the streets in resistance. We stand in solidarity with these poets, & our Winter Contest Issue demonstrates what we have always known—poetry is resistance. For many of us, resistance is our daily way of life.
 
We are proud & honored to share these poems with you. May the individual truths these poets offer, their beautiful ways of seeing those sometimes harowing sometimes glorious worlds around them, offer us guidance & strength as we navigate & shape our own worlds.
 
Stay warm, friends.
 
All love & light on this darkest night of the year, made brighter for you poets and supporters of the arts existing in this world—
 
<3 Jenn

(Poetry Editor)

Jennifer Givhan was a 2010 Pen Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellow, as well as a 2011 St. Lawrence Book Award finalist and a 2012 Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways Prize finalist for her poetry collection Red Sun Mother. She was also an Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize finalist for her poetry collection Karaoke Night at the Asylum. She is an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in over fifty journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets 2013, Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, cream city review and The Los Angeles Review. She teaches composition at Western New Mexico University.