The Keith Taylor Excellence in Poetry Award

This award recognizes an outstanding undergraduate poet who best exemplifies the spirit of Keith Taylor’s writing and life, exploring the human condition and its relationship to the world around us. The award is in honor of Keith Taylor, a poet, writer, and recently-retired A.L. Becker Collegiate Lecturer, director of the Bear River Writers’ Conference and coordinator of the English Department’s undergraduate creative writing program. We are thrilled to carry on Keith Taylor’s remarkable legacy of mentorship on this campus by celebrating outstanding undergraduate poets in his name.

This award in poetry will celebrate excellence for a selection of original poems by an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan. 

Submission Guidelines

As with the other Hopwood contests, you may only submit once per category per awards cycle.

Please submit, as one PDF document, 3-5 poems, adding up to no more than 15 pages total (not including the title page).

You may choose to submit a selection of poems that are included in your submission to this year's Hopwood Undergraduate Poetry category, but you may not submit any poem that has been previously recognized by a Hopwood Awards Program award or prize.

Students may submit manuscripts with changes up until 11:59 p.m on the date of deadline.

No manuscript or part of a manuscript that has been published in a medium other than a college magazine or college newspaper may be entered in any contest. 

Only original work may be entered in the contest. Collaborations, translations, and adaptations are not acceptable. Only the written portion of mixed-media manuscripts may be submitted.

The committee reserves the right to retain for its files one copy of each winning manuscript.

Entries should be in 10, 11, or 12 point font, with a left-hand margin of 1 inch. A contestant must use a pen name - one that is entirely different from their real name. This name should only appear on the title page, nowhere else in the manuscript. Submissions should be in PDF format. Please make sure the pen name you select in your registration matches the one on your PDF.  The same pen name must be used for all categories.

The PDF must have a title page on which shall appear: 

• The title
• The pen name
• The contest entered (e.g. The Keith Taylor Excellence in Poetry Award)