Poetry Scholarships
If you love writing poetry, you may be eligible for numerous poetry writing scholarships. Many of these scholarships for poetry are merit or need based, but some are won, or lost, based on the results of poetry competitions. There are, however, some poetry scholarship opportunities that are overlooked. These poetry scholarships include the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund and The Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, among others.
The Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund began in 2004, and it awards between $125,000 and $200,000 in scholarship awards each year. The deadline for entering the contest and your application occurs in October of each year. These awards are for lyric poems that celebrate the spirit of life. The work that you enter must be original, it must belong to you and be written by you, and it must be unpublished. As the author, you must be under the age of 40. This is an actual cash prize, as opposed to an actual scholarship, so the funds are disbursed to you, and not to your school. It’s the perfect scholarship because students can choose to spend this award any way they please.
The Scholastic Art and Writing Awards are available for those students who are in grades between seven and twelve. There are about 50,000 regional winners and 400 national winners in a variety of genres each year. If you are seeking a this writing scholarship, however, you should be a graduating high school senior, and you must submit between three and eight bodies of work for general writing or nonfiction writing. The deadline for entering varies from one region to another, so you will need to find out what the deadline is for your specific region. The amount of the awards vary, but the organization awards approximately $3.9 million annually.
There is literally thousands of writing contests held each year that result in cash prizes, but it is vital that you pay attention to what the awards are, how they are disbursed, and the requirements for each poetry contest. Typically, your work must be original and not used for any other contest. This means a lot of poetry writing on your part. In most cases, you will be required to submit more than one poem, and in some cases, even if it isn’t required, you will want to submit more than one body of work to increase your odds of winning the contest and the prize money.
While poetry may be your main focus, as a writer, you need to enter as many different writing contests as possible, if there is a scholarship or cash prize offered. Due to the high cost of college, you simply cannot afford to miss out on any opportunities, and one of the great things about applying for poetry writing scholarships and entering contests, is that scholarships can be used to pay for your education, while prize money can be used to pay for education or living expenses. This is the perfect scholarship as you can find today.
For more information about the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund visit http://www.dorothyprizes.org/. For information regarding the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards visit http://www.artandwriting.org/.