Every April, for National Poetry Month, Baker Books ran a children's poetry-writing contest for pupils in kindergarten through eighth grade. It began at the Dartmouth store in the late 1990s, ran for more than a decade, and by the middle of the 2000s was drawing several hundred entries a year at each of the store's two locations — in one year, roughly seven hundred from the Dartmouth store alone, from more than two dozen area schools, and a further three hundred and fifty from the Fall River store.
This page describes the programme, not the participants. The children who entered were between five and fourteen years old at the time; their names, ages, schools, home towns, poems and photographs are not reproduced in this archive, and will not be. What is worth preserving is how the thing was run, because it worked and because it is repeatable.
The annual theme
The organising trick — and it is a good one — was that each year's contest was pegged to a specific published children's book. Rather than asking a nine-year-old to write a poem, which produces either nothing or a rhyming couplet about a cat, the store asked for a poem on this theme, after this book, and put the book where children could see it.
The themes ran the range. Animals, one year. Musical poems, after a picture book about rhythm — that year the brief invited children to write about how music made them feel or move, about a favourite instrument or song, about tempo, or to write an actual song, with a separate award in each store for the best musical entry. Summertime, after a picture book about the last long afternoons of the season. Poems about what the writer could see, after a collection about looking closely. One year the theme was This Land Is Your Land, run in collaboration with a local theatre's programme on America. Another year the invitation was to write about world records, after a collection of poems on the greatest and the fastest and the largest.
Pegging the theme to a book did three things at once: it gave the child a model, it gave teachers something to read aloud in class, and it gave the contest a natural relationship with the publisher, who would usually donate copies as prizes.
The mechanics
- Grade bands. Three of them, so that a six-year-old was never judged against a thirteen-year-old: younger poets in the early primary grades, middle-grade poets, and young teen poets in the middle-school years. The band boundaries shifted slightly over the years.
- Five winners per band at each location — a first, second and third, plus two honourable mentions.
- A minimum of four lines. That was the whole formal requirement, and it is exactly the right one: long enough to be a poem, short enough that no child is defeated by the form.
- Illustration encouraged. Entrants were invited to illustrate their poems with markers, paint or construction paper, which brought in a great many children who would not have entered a writing competition.
- Songs accepted on CD or cassette in the years when the theme allowed it.
- Paper entry forms picked up in the store, with a single fixed deadline in mid-April.
Judging and the ceremony
Judging was done by a local writers' group that met at the bookstore — working writers, unconnected to the schools, reading the entries without the entrants present. That is a better arrangement than a staff panel: it removes the shop from the awkward position of grading its own customers' children, and it means the judgement is made by people who write.
Winners were announced at a public awards ceremony and poetry reading, held at the store and, in later years, in a public library reading room. Prizes were modest and deliberately book-shaped: publishers donated copies of the theme title, every winner received a certificate of achievement, and the first-place entrant in each band received a gift certificate to the bookshop. In at least one year the author of the theme book attended the ceremony in person.
Why a bookshop ran it
A general bookstore has no obvious commercial reason to run a poetry competition for eight-year-olds. The entry was free, the prizes cost money, and the administrative load of several hundred paper entries in three grade bands across two locations is not trivial.
The reason is that it did something no display could. It put several hundred children a year into the position of having written something, and it put their teachers, parents and librarians into the position of helping them do it. The store's founders held, as a stated principle, that universal literacy is paramount to the success of a community, and worked continuously with area schools and libraries on that basis. The contest was the most visible expression of it.
It is also a model that any independent bookshop can copy, and several have: peg the theme to a real book, keep the formal requirement to four lines, split by grade band, have outside writers judge, and hold a real ceremony. The Poetry Foundation and the Academy of American Poets — which established National Poetry Month in 1996 — both publish free classroom material for exactly this. Reading Rockets is the standard practical resource for teachers and parents working on children's reading and writing.
The store's other literacy work is described on the archive's page about the Literati programme.