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Next year will mark the 21st anniversary of the Syracuse Poster Project. The organization is calling for poets to enter the competition, which has a new theme this year: “Seven Syracuse Spirits.”

The project brings together the poets and artists of central New York and combines their skills to create heart-warming posters centered around Syracuse culture, seven of which will be chosen to be displayed in downtown Syracuse and sold as prints.

The deadline for poetry submissions is Sept. 30, and completed posters are due Nov. 22. Winning artists will be awarded $500 for first place, $300 for second place and $100 for third place, but all runner-ups will be gifted prints of their posters.

The prompt asks poets to choose a “spirit of Syracuse” from a list and write a three-to-four line poem about or in the voice of that spirit. The “spirits” of Syracuse include “the spirit of neighborhood harmony,” “the spirit of school snow days” and “the spirit of Onondaga Creek,” along with four others.

In the previous two decades of the Poster Project, the poems were limited to haikus, but this year the project will accept slightly longer poems or those with different structure, though haikus are still accepted. The chosen poems will be presented to artists, who choose their favorite and let it inspire an illustrated poster.

The posters will be displayed downtown on S. Salina and S. Warren streets in 43 inch by 62 inch poster panels. Additionally, they will also be sold and displayed as prints at multiple downtown exhibit spaces, and they will also be sold online.

Since 2001, the project’s first year, the organization has been collaborating with Syracuse University’s senior illustration courses to give students the chance to create the art based off of the haiku created by the poets. The Poster Project remains open to Syracuse students, but starting in 2017 the competition expanded to include all residents of central New York, so there is more competition.

Interested writers can find entry materials on Poster Project’s website and can directly contact the organization’s project coordinator Jim Emmons at [email protected].

Published on September 8, 2021 at 11:16 pm

Contact Sydney: [email protected]