WELCOME TO SOUTH DAKOTA STATE POETRY SOCIETY

To encourage poem-making and
poem-reading in South Dakota.

  • South Dakota
SDSPS was organized in 1927 and incorporated as a South Dakota non-profit on August 8, 1970.

Our Mission

To encourage and foster the writing and publication of poetry by South Dakota writers and to promote excellence therein; to arouse in students of high school and college age, interest in the creative writing of poetry; to foster or publish Pasque Petals, a magazine, on a regular basis, thereby continuing the publication which was begun before the Society was organized, which publication is devoted chiefly to poetry, to stimulate by such proper means as the sponsoring of contests, awarding of prizes, and by other means of encouragement, the writing of poetry; and by these means to aid in the cultural growth of South Dakota.

SDSPS acknowledges that we share the traditional lands of the Oceti Sakowin, or Seven Council Fires nations, the proper name for the tribes of the Santee-Dakota, Yankton-Nakota, and Teton-Lakota people, referred to collectively as the Sioux.

fountain pen, notebook, paper

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Poetry Writing Workshop

By sdpoetry | September 25, 2017

Featured image by Megan, under the creative commons license.  

Submission Opportunities through NFSPS

By sdpoetry | September 22, 2017

The South Dakota State Poetry Society belongs to the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, which hosts many poetry competitions. You can check out the Strophes publication here for more information about specific contests and submission opportunities around the country. Featured image by kiler129, under the creative commons license.

South Dakota Festival of Books

By Bruce Roseland | August 28, 2017

When the first South Dakota Festival of Books was held in Deadwood October 3-5, 2003, my attention was caught by articles in the newspapers that tried to explain the concept. I did not attend that first Festival, even though I had written poems in my school days. I was still too caught up in the […]

SD Poets You Should Know: Christine Stewart-Nuñez

By Barbara Duffey | August 14, 2017

Christine Stewart-Nuñez, an associate professor of English at South Dakota State, writes poems that are often narrative and often about her family, including the death of her sister (in Keeping Them Alive) and her own experience as a mother of a child with special needs (in the forthcoming Bluewords Greening). Her poems always pay close […]

Developing Imagery in Poetry

By Christine | August 14, 2017

As Jane Hirshfield writes in Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, “Images…are forms that let us inhabit abstraction as if from within, and so begin to know our kinship with the wide field of being.” I love that sentence although I admit, I need to ponder it a bit each time I read it. […]

SD Poets You Should Know: Marcella Remund

By Barbara Duffey | July 31, 2017

Marcella Remund, who lives in Vermillion and teaches at USD, has been writing poems for years but only recently begun publishing.  Drawing on rich religious and cultural tradition, her poems are concerned with language, feminism, and emotion.  Here’s a poem of hers from the online journal Stirring, from Sundress Publications: RELIC I keep this shard […]

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