For twenty years Esther M. Leiper has been poetry editor for the Writer’s Journal and its predecessor, the Inkling Literary Journal. Her duties include judging the magazine’s poetry contests--up to five hundred anonymous entries at a time--and then penning a sensitive, scholarly critique of the prize-winning poems.

Esther started at the magazine with many years of experience as an enthusiastic contest participant. Since 1965, as a senior in high school at the Friends Central School outside Philadelphia, she has won more than one thousand prizes and other awards in national, state, and local contests. In 1984, Inkling Literary Journal published the first edition of How to Enter Poetry Contests to WIN, long since out of print. I have two tattered copies shared with students and members of my poetry workshop. We welcome this revised and expanded edition published by the Writer’s Journal.

WIN begins with an informative but relaxed and friendly discussion of getting started as a poet. In Part One, Esther draws from her own experience of how to find time to write and polish poems. She then introduces readers to the contest scene, explaining how to choose the right contest for their poems and the importance of studying and strictly following the entry rules. Aspiring poets will welcome the tools of the trade presented in Part Two, an all-new section with examples and explanations of thirty different forms and patterns of poetry. Part Three offers readers a chance to judge for themselves twenty of the author’s first-prize poems as Esther discusses how she came to write them.

The extensive glossary and wide-ranging bibliography that conclude this sound and informative edition are there for the taking for those with the will to emulate the creativity and mine the resourcefulness of one of America’s finest poets and editors, Esther M. Leiper.

Robert S. Shelford

DeLand, Florida

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