Coastal Carolina University senior Victoria Green has been named the winner of the 21st annual Paul Rice Poetry Broadside Series competition at CCU.

Green, an English major from Liberty, S.C., won the award for her "Sonnet for a Sick Mother." The award includes a $100 prize and 25 copies of the broadside to be produced in an edition of 100 numbered copies.

"Writing this poem was a challenging ordeal because I was speaking from my own experiences about my own mother," said Green. "I spent a lot of time trying to work out how dedicated I would be to the sonnet form. Eventually, I ended up with 'Sonnet for a Sick Mother,' which had no punctuation and strayed very far from the traditional notion of a sonnet."

The final judge, poet Alan Michael Parker, said, "The overlapping and inlaid syntax of 'Sonnet for a Sick Mother' work beautifully together to create a complex portrait of ambivalence and love. There's friction and fractiousness here, loss and lament, and the form complements the content spectacularly." Parker also awarded honorable mention to Hallie Bond's "Separate Transactions" and Alice Kitchen's "The Monument of a Memory."

Parker is the author of seven collections of poems including "Days Like Prose," "The Vandals" and "Love Song with Motor Vehicles." He has published more than 200 poems, stories and essays in publications such as The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker. In 2012 he was named Douglas C. Houchens Professor of English at Davidson College.

The Paul Rice Poetry Broadside Series is a poetry competition held each semester and is open to current CCU undergraduate students. The contest is named in honor and memory of the late Paul Rice, CCU professor of English from 1987 to his death in 2004. Rice was a distinguished poet, composer, singer/songwriter and newspaper columnist.

For more information or to acquire a copy of the broadside, contact Jason Ockert in CCU's Department of English at jockert@coastal.edu or 843-349-2531.