How to Find Poetry Contests for Children

If your son, daughter, niece, nephew or neighbor loves to write poems, give them a heads up about contests they may like to enter. They should be creative because they love language, but prizes can be fun too. Some awards come with readings, which is another exciting experience for a budding poet.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

Things You’ll Need:

• Internet access
• Local newspaper

1. Check out the annual country fair, with its contest regulations. It is guaranteed to have a poetry category, even for kids. Often these are divided into sections for rhyming poems or specialty poems such as haiku. It's great fun for them to design a poem attractively to be posted for all to see, prize or no prize. Having an age category or age posting on the writing helps, too.
2. See if your local arts center sponsors a poetry contest for children. Often they like to encourage this type of creative writing in kids. If they haven't done this yet, suggest it. You just need some adult judges and the prizes don't need to be extravagant. If you publicize things right, teachers can help by assigning poems to classes. However, there may be plenty of entries regardless.
3. Check out the Internet for poetry contests, but make sure they're legitimate. Avoid any contests with entry fees. One such contest is "River of Words" started by poet Robert Hass when he was Poet Laureate. Child poets enter by grade and must write a poem that relates to watershed. Winners go to Washington D.C. This is an example of a legitimate contest so watch out for Internet scams that want you to send money for a fee to enter a non-existent contest.
4. Look for poetry contests in children's magazines. Sometimes having the poem published is prize enough and magazines such as "Highlights" and "Stone Soup", among others, are open to publishing children's poems.
5. Prepare children for not winning by giving them support and encouragement, no matter what. They win either way because they have practiced expressing themselves with metaphor and powerful language. If kids work on raps or songs, that's great, too. This would be a more common direction for older kids.