Written by Kenzie James // Photo by Edgar Cardiel
Three Harding students received awards for their poems in a statewide poetry contest last week.
Sophomore Ayden Pritchard, senior Elliott Coombes and freshman Joseph Huffaker submitted work to the Poetry Roundtable of Arkansas 2024 Pat Laster Collegiate Poetry Contest and received an email last week notifying them of their awards.
Pritchard placed second, Coombes earned first honorable mention and Huffaker earned second honorable mention.
The Poetry Roundtable of Arkansas is a statewide nonprofit dedicated to the study of poetry and encouraging poets. This competition encouraged college students to write and enter a free verse poem on any subject of their choice.
Dr. Nick Boone and Professor Paulette Bane, two of Harding’s English professors, are members of the PRA. Bane shared the details of the contest with her students and encouraged them to enter.
Bane said being a writer is a long game and that she wants her students to start putting themselves out in the writing community because they won’t always get immediate success.
“[The goal is] just reminding them that they shouldn’t fear rejection and that it takes sending out work,” Bane said. “The point is to be part of a community and take yourself seriously as a writer.”
Pritchard has written poetry for the past four years and previously entered his work in the Jo Cleveland Creative Writing Contest through Harding’s English department.
Pritchard said his writing is truth driven and focused on how our minds interact with the world. The poem that he placed with was based on an experience he had reading a book.
“There’s a whole sentence on one page, and then you flip the page, and there was just one word from that sentence on the next page and it had a question mark,” Pritchard said. “I ended up writing a poem, and I don’t know how I made this connection, but [it was] just kind of this image of a lot of the calamity going on in the world.”
Huffaker said his poem was about seeing the Christmas lights hanging up on campus in January and that they were a reminder of what he lost leaving home to start the new semester.
“Whenever I have my biggest first creativity inspiration, it’s me having this big wave of emotion and having an object nearby that I can associate with it,” Huffaker said. “It’s like weaving together an object and an emotion in a way that I don’t think is normally done.”
