The Poetry Society of South Carolina

06/18/2026

This is always a good time. Don't you dare miss it!

06/14/2026

Poetry Trails: Riverfront Park, 6/13/2026. This was the last official PSSC event of the 2025-2026 membership year. Thanks for all your support.

06/14/2026

We had a lovely time at Riverfront Park, North Charleston, for today's Poetry Trails. This is the last official PSSC event of the 2025-2026 membership year. The next thing that will happen is the Yearbook will go out to all those members who are at a membership level to receive the print copy, and others will receive the digital copy. Look in your mail boxes in about a month. Thank you for your support this year. It has been a great one and we couldn't have done it without our wonderful members and friends.

06/01/2026

Oh boy oh boy! The June Newsletter has arrived. View it here:

The Poetry Society of South Carolina is Sponsored by Generous Grants from South Carolina Humanities, South Carolina Arts Commission, and the John and Susan Bennett Memorial Fund of the Coastal Community Foundation.

05/26/2026

This is big, folks: we have one more event for the Charleston area before we break for Summer. If you weren't at Riverfront Park for the first one last spring, I can tell you that it was a fantastic time for everyone--and set a record for attendance. Please plan to attend this on June 13. You will be glad you did.

05/24/2026

The Sundown Poetry Series of Piccolo Spoleto is nearly here. It's perhaps the oldest Piccolo Spoleto program (47 years so far!) and one of the last free events. Poetry Society members have curated this series for decades, bringing a diverse, talented selection of great poets to Charleston. This takes place at Washington Square Park (behind City Hall at the 4-Corners of Law, Meeting and Broad).

05/16/2026

The Winner of the 2026 Skylark Prize is Ellison Peace from the Governor's School of the Arts in Greenville. He could not attend last night's meeting in person, so he sent us this video of him reading his winning poem, "Cindy Darnell Smokes a Cigarette in a Parking Lot and is Forcibly Reminded of her Father."

The Skylark Prize is offered in memory of author John Bennett (1865...

05/16/2026

Winners 2025-2026: Spring Competitions

THE SOUTH CAROLINA NATURE CONSERVANCY PRIZE

Winner – William Ramsey: Waiting by 378 for the Monks to Cross into South Carolina
Honorable Mention – Judith Reese

Judge’s Comments: This poem succeeds by creating its own singular ambience and ecosystem, a thick co-existence in which human consciousness inhabits non-human nature, and vice versa, and each side retains its impenetrability, its authority, its integrity, its mystery.

THE JOHN H. BENNETT, JR. PRIZE

Winner – Dan Leach: Still Life No. 42: Radish in Porcelain Bowl
Honorable Mention – Ruth Nicholson

Judge’s Comments: I love the detail in this poem and the perfectly-phrased question around which the poem revolves: “What here doesn't want to be red when red is what remembers you?”

THE OLIVER BOWMAN MEMORIAL PRIZE

Winner – Jacob Beckwith Graudin: Sweet Tooth
Honorable Mention – Dan Leach

Judge’s Comments: There is a kind of rhyming poem whose pleasure is measured by the near-transparency of its rhyme, so natural is its speech and so well-fit is its mode to its matter. This poem’s celebration of indulgence is at once an ode, elegy, and love letter.



THE PETER PAN PRIZE

Winner – Dan Leach: The Dirty Kid
Honorable Mention – Debra Daniel

Judge’s Comments: It’s difficult to write about children without succumbing to sentimentality. It’s difficult to be funny. This poem clears both hurdles while creating an exquisite portrait of a child who moves easily through a difficult world with an innocence in which adults are complicit.

THE DR. LINDA VELDHEER MEMORIAL PRIZE

Winner – William Ramsey: Merci Sans La Belle Dame
Honorable Mention – Ellen Malphrus

Judge’s Comments: Stunning opening stanza that carries the poem through to its haunting ending.

THE DANA BURNET PRIZE

Winner – Tim Conroy: A Gardener’s Journal
Honorable Mention – Debra Daniel, Lisa Sloan

Judge’s Comments: Beautiful attention to sound and imagery in this poem.

THE SCOTTY DAVIS WATSON PRIZE

Winner – Dan Leach: Mushroom Fragments
Honorable Mention – Grace Claire Przywara

Judge’s Comments: These small observational studies capture, with deft economy, the essential unknowability of nature and the marvel of its unending proliferation while evoking the pleasures of attention, the forest, and of poetry.

THE FORUM PRIZE

Winner - Ed Madden
Honorable Mentions - Grace Claire Przywara, Tim Conroy

THE SKYLARK PRIZE
Ellison Peace, Governor's School of the Arts

05/16/2026