New IBPC judge: David Biespiel

The winners of last month’s InterBoard Poetry Competition have not yet been announced, but we have just heard from the IBPC editors about the reasons for the delay, and they have named the new judge. Here’s the word, from the horse’s mouth:

from David Ayers, President of the IBPC Board of Directors:
“As you are probably aware, we’ve experienced unusual delays in recent months with the poetry competition.... On behalf of the IBPC board I’d like to apologize for the delays and briefly explain what happened. First, we had a number of difficulties establishing and maintaining email contact with the previous judge, Dave Brinks. As you may recall his original term was interrupted last summer by Hurricane Katrina. We invited him back to finish the term this February/March, but in retrospect it might have been too soon. Dave has been involved in a lot of the post-Katrina clean-up efforts, not to mention poetry efforts, which no doubt limited his availability. We were also somewhat reluctant to bother him because of this and as a result the March winners were quite late coming back to us.... Another problem arose in April when we were temporarily without a judge after the person we thought we had confirmed for the current term turned out not to be. This left us scrambling for a couple of weeks trying to find a suitable replacement. “Fortunately, we have resolved these issues, and I am confident that we will be able to return to normal here very soon. With Rus Bowden’s assistance we have secured judges for the next three terms. The first of these, David Biespiel, will be judging the April/May/June poems, followed this summer by Tree Riesener, and David Kirby this fall. We also have several names on tap for 2007, and hopefully, a surprise judge to announce here very soon for our Poem of the Year competition.”

While we’re awaiting his choices from the April & May entries, your poetry guides have put together a page on David Biespiel so that you can read some of his essays & poems published online & get a sense of his poetic values.

Related resources:
Our April IBPC entries
Our May IBPC entries
About the IBPC
Requirements for IBPC nominees
Anthology of the monthly IBPC winning poems
Archive of poems entered in the IBPC from our Poetry Forum