Poetry 99

April is National Poetry Month, and the Chico News & Review is celebrating by once again giving over these pages to the art of words. For the annual Poetry 99 issue, we task local writers with composing poems of 99 or fewer words, and this year they met the challenge in a huge way. According to the members of the 1078 Gallery Literary Committee—a five-person panel composed of English teachers, instructors, published writers and editors—this was the strongest batch of poetry submitted during the their five years judging the contest. We thank them for their efforts reading the hundreds of entries, and we thank the community’s poets for allowing us to share their work in these pages.

Notes: In the high school honorable mentions, there is a student, Shawn, from Table Mountain School in Butte County Juvenile Hall who made the cut. The student’s last name has been omitted to protect his anonymity.

To ensure unbiased consideration, author names were removed from poems before being given to the judges. In the further interest of fairness, judge Muir Hughes recused herself from judging the high school category as her son and daughter, Ender and Seven Mills, were entrants.