OI 4 FW 2024

Fall/Winter 2024

At Common Ground Review, we seek to publish well crafted poems, short stories and creative nonfiction that surprise and illuminate, amuse, inform, and/or challenge--not always all at once. CGR comes out twice a year (except recently, while we've adjusted to the on-line format) and accepts submissions from September to May: we hold our poetry contest once a year, opening up for entries in January and this year closing it in mid-April .

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We are delighted to announce that Rebecca Hart Olander will be judging our 2024 Poetry Contest.

Rebecca Hart Olander’s poetry and collaborative visual and written work has appeared in print, online, and in multiple anthologies. Her books include Dressing the Wounds (dgp, 2019) and Uncertain Acrobats (CavanKerry Press, 2021), named a Must-Read selection by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Rebecca has taught at Amherst and Smith colleges, Westfield State University, and through Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop, and she works with poets in the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing. She is the editor/director of Perugia Press.

Her first post-grad poem publication appeared in Common Ground Review, and she is honored to return to those roots as a judge for this year’s contest.


Poems from our 2023 contest (judged by Oliver de la Paz) are still up in our Spring/Summer 2023 issue:

First Place "Tree Streets" by Josh Jacobs

Second Place "You're from Nowhere" by Abby E. Murray

Third Place "In Case I Ever End Up on a True Crime Podcast" by Kelli Lage

Honorable Mention "Overhearing your native tongue in a foreign land" by Joseph Scalice


2023 Poetry Contest Winners

This year's judge: Oliver de la Paz is the Poet Laureate of Worcester, Massachusetts, for 2023-2025. He is the author and editor of seven books, including The Boy in the Labyrinth, a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry. His newest work, The Diaspora Sonnets, is forthcoming from Liveright Press in 2023. A founding member, Oliver serves as the cochair of the Kundiman advisory board. He has been awarded multiple Pushcart Prizes and teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at PLU.