2 . College Undergraduate Poetry (CUP) Competition

Two winners will be chosen for the College Undergraduate Poetry Competition, one receiving the Edna Meudt Memorial Award; the other receiving the Florence Kahn Memorial Award. For each winner, prizes include:

●$500 cash prize.

●Publication of the manuscript (原稿) as a book & marketed through Amazon.com.

●75 free copies of the book.

●Application and Manuscript. Complete the application form and upload your manuscript file online at https://nfsps.submittable.com/submit.The manuscript must be a single document that contains only your title page followed by ten poems. Once you have uploaded the file, you cannot make edits.

●Fees.There is a $10 contest submission fee and no charge to open an account at Submittable.com.

●Submission Period. From the first minute of December 1 to midnight on January 31.

Not following ALL guidelines disqualifies a submission.

●No Identification. There must be no author identification on any page of the manuscript.

●Title Page and Ten Poems. The manuscript will include only the title page and 10 original, unpublished poems.

●Titles. Except for haiku and related Japanese forms, each poem must be titled.

●Judging.Up to 60 entries will be sent to a judge who will remain anonymous (匿名的) until the winners are announced. Manuscripts are judged blind (identified only by machine-generated number). Decisions are final.

●Notification of Winners. Winners will be announced in the April issue of Strophes, available at nfsps.com.

●Contact Information. If there is any change in your contact information, please contact Jessica at jessica.NFSPS@gmail.com.

3 . My Favorite Sweater

By Bonnie Highsmith Taylor

My favorite sweater grew too small.

I love that sweater best of all.

My grandma made it when I was three.

She made that sweater just for me.

I picked the yarn (纱线), a special blue.

The color of bluebells (风铃草), wet with dew (露珠).

When I was three I was very small.

But now I’m five and much too tall.

I have a new jacket now that’s green.

So I gave my sweater to our cat Queen.

Queen just gave birth to kittens in the shed (小屋).

My favorite sweater is now their bed.

Today, many Chinese people are becoming more interested in reading poems, no matter in     1    language they are written. Translations can be good, but being able to read in the original language is best. No matter how well a poem is translated, something of the spirit of the original work is     2    . Besides, poems and literature can be bridges between East and West. They can help us to understand each other better, or as the poet Mu Dan     3     :

Quietly, we embrace

In a world lit up by words.

Satire (讽刺)is     1    art form in which wrongdoing is mocked. There     2    (be) great satires created by artists and writers in the past 300 years in many different cultures, but one of the most famous is Gulliver's Travels (1724) by Anglo-Irish writer Johnathan Swift. It is a satire based     3     English politics in the 18^th century.

The book contains four imaginary sea voyages by a ship's doctor and later captain, Lemuel Gulliver. Swift uses the cultures of each of these countries     4    (make) satirical points about the real world.

The most famous of these places is Lilli-put, a land     5    the people are only 15cm tall. The story of the gigantic Gulliver among these tiny people is very     6    ( amuse).

But when Gulliver hears about the political system of Lilli-put, he compares it to     7    (England). The citizens of Lilli-put think their parties have different aims,     8    in reality they both are greedy and only want increasingly     9    ( much) power.     10    ( see) this, Swift concluded that the only difference is their high-heeled shoes.