Kathryn Irene Glascock, class of 1922, was a promising poet. She served as editor of the Mount Holyoke News and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Academic Honor Society. After graduation, she moved to New York City and worked as a magazine editor. Less than a year afterwards, she passed away from pneumonia. Her parents gave Mount Holyoke a donation in her name and worked with her former professor, Ada Snell, to found the poetry contest, as a memorial to Glascock’s life and work, and The Mount Holyoke News matched her parents’ contribution for the prize money. Snell ran the contest for 15 years before her retirement in 1938. In 1950, she donated funds to establish a second-place prize.
In 1923, the Glascock began as a poetry contest among Mount Holyoke students, becoming an intercollegiate competition in 1924, when Robert Frost served as one of the first judges. Since then, Mount Holyoke has invited five different colleges each year to send poet-contestants who submit short portfolios of poems, which they read aloud at the students’ reading, the core event in the two-day Glascock festivities. A Mount Holyoke student also competes in the contest each year, and a panel of three distinguished poets determines a winner, based on the written and performed poems. Judged by numerous luminaries of American poetry over the last hundred years, the Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Competition is the longest running contest of its kind with nearly 900 poets having participated as judges, contestants, or both over the last century.
Before email, the competition relied on letters and telegrams to coordinate the arrival of contestants from across the Northeast. In this telegram, Constance Horton, a contestant from Bryn Mawr College, accepts the invitation to participate in the 1957 Glascock competition, organized by Mount Holyoke English professor Joyce Horner. For many years, Horner helmed the committee that invites other colleges to send contestants and judges to adjudicate. Due to travel considerations, the majority of judges and contestants have come from the Northeast with many traveling within New England. In most years, another member of the 5-College Consortium and another historically women’s college are invited to send contestants.
To celebrate the Glascock contest’s 50th anniversary, the English Department created Preludes, a selection of contestant poems from 1924 to 1973. The poems, selected by the 1973 Glascock committee, include work by Muriel Rukeyser, James Merrill, Robert Lowell, Kenneth Koch, Sylvia Plath, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg. In the introduction, the committee explains some of the criteria they used in selecting poems: only one poem per poet, longer poems ruled out or excerpted. Generally, though not always, they selected work by contest winners. Together, the poems provide a fascinating insight into the evolution of American poetry over a half century of intense change.
Mount Holyoke’s Department of English hosted a reception to celebrate the publication of Preludes, as part of the competition’s 50th anniversary. The New York Room in Mary Woolley Hall has been the location of numerous Glascock events over the last 100 years. The Stimson Room on the sixth floor of Mount Holyoke’s Williston Library has been the site of many Glascock events since the 1990s.
In 2022, the Glascock returned to in-person festivities after a year of remote events in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Judges Oliver de la Paz, Nathan McClain, and Mary-Kim Arnold chose Clare O’Gara of Smith College as the winner of the contest with other students participating from Wesleyan University, Howard University, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, the University of New Hampshire, and Mount Holyoke College.