Local poet, LTCC faculty member Janet Smith wins national award

South Lake Tahoe poet and LTCC English faculty Janet Smith has won the 2013 Guy Owen Prize for her poem “The Children’s Section.” The poem, for which Smith received $1000, will appear in the fall issue of the “Southern Poetry Review.”

Poet Arthur Smith chose the poem from a short list of finalists.

“The subject matter, the reading experience in childhood, could have been easily sentimentalized, but the poet consistently pulls back from that with an even more powerful detail which sees into the heart of the creation of the imagination,” he said.

Longtime Meyers resident Smith published her first collection, “All of a Sudden Nothing Happened,” in 2010 and it is available locally at Bona Fide Books and online. She is working on her second collection, which is concerned with themes of loss and the natural world.

For more information about the prize, visit www.southernpoetryreview.org.