Montgomery County Poets Laureate
The Annual Montgomery Poet Laureate Competition is the foundation upon which the MCPL Program was built. The competition is the ultimate expression of the program’s mission; creating an ever expanding community of poets, supporting their work and providing opportunities for poets to elevate their visibility while also benefiting the community with their service project, many of which continue long beyond their tenure.
How does the competition work?
Each year MCPL recruits a celebrity poet with a national reputation, who along with two additional local Delaware Valley poets, adjudicate the submitted manuscripts.
The newly selected Montgomery County Poet Laureate is honored with an award in the amount of $500 along with a personalized statement about their work, which is shared through MCPL and other local organizations.
The Award is presented during an Award Ceremony and Reading, open to the public and attended by the celebrity judge and previous poets laureate to read with and welcome the newest member of their esteemed ranks.
Who can compete?
Poets of all ages and backgrounds are encouraged to submit their poetry for review and adjudication in the annual competition. Poets must also be residents of Montgomery County. The window for submissions generally opens in early December and closes mid-February with the winner to be announced at the end of March.
The role of the Poet Laureate
The Poet Laureate functions as an ambassador for poetry in Montgomery County from April 1 of the year of his/her naming to March 31st of the following year. This role includes working with MCPL’s Executive Director, Joanne Leva, to develop a schedule of readings, workshops
Appearances may include the Forgotten Voices Poetry Group, Farley’s Bookshop First Thursday Poetry Reading Series, and the annual Caesura Poetry Festival. They may also hold the office of “
2009 Poet Laureate – Doris Ferleger
Poet Laureate 2009
Doris FerIeger, Ph.D.
Doris Ferleger, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and poet whose poetry and memoir essays have been published in numerous literary journals including: Bridges, California Quarterly, Calyx, Comstock Review, Confluence, Many Mountains Moving, Northeast Corridor, Phoebe (Suny), South Carolina Review, South Dakota Review, 13th Moon, and in anthologies entitled: Motherpoet and Journey into Motherhood. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College and has attended well-regarded writers conferences including Bread Loaf and the Krakow Polish Poetry Seminar, founded by Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, which brought established and emerging American poets to Poland to discuss Polish poetry and the interface between poetry and history. Ferleger’s ardent interest in poetry and history is reflected in her book entitled Big Silences in a Year of Rain. Of Ferleger’s book, poet Bill Olsen writes:
Bonhoffer wrote of grace that “it is only when one loves life and the world so much that without them everything would be gone, that one can believe in…a new world.” That new world, in all its astonishing difficulties and almost unlovable vastness, is, I think, the subject proper of Doris Ferleger’s exceptional manuscript Big Silences in a Year of Rain. The poetry has a rough music, but it never slouches, it glides, and away from Bethlehem, away from pretty ideals; and it exists in and for this world, always. These poems about Jewishness lost and found and about parentage from both ends of experience are lived inside with an intensity that is extremely rare, and with such joy in the medium, resoundingly celebratory of the invisible yet somehow palpable powers of poetry.
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Poets Laureate
