In 2018, Pike County Extension Fine Arts paired with Pikeville Poetry to begin an annual community poetry contest. The contest, held each spring, began as a K-12 contest for all schools in Pike County, including county and independent city districts, private institutions within the county, and homeschooled students. The contest offers three grade level categories, including K-5, 6-8, and 9-12. In 2019, however, an adult poetry & essay component was added to include the entire community. Since this program began, we have also collaborated with the Pikeville Book Club and Appalachia Book Company to organize the contest.

Works of writing generated by this contest are meant to inspire unity and progress, as well as provide an opportunity for creative expression. We hope to encourage writers to focus on “how the world is and how it could be” with an emphasis on issues they see and solutions they imagine. 

We also center a distinguished Kentucky writer with each year’s prompt. The organizing team made the collective decision upon the conception of Voices of Pike to elevate voices of color, women, LGBTQ+, and/or other marginalized communities as a way to increase the educational effort of the program and to celebrate inclusivity and diversity. 

This year, we focused on words from Crystal Wilkinson, a founding member of the The Affrilachian Poets—a group of African American writers who share roots in Appalachia and work to defy the persistent stereotype of a racially homogenized rural region. Wilkinson currently teaches as an associate professor of English in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Kentucky and was recently selected as a 2020 United States Artists Fellow. In previous years we have drawn from the words of notable Kentuckians Anne Braden and bell hooks. 

Since the contest began, several teachers in both the Pike County and Pikeville City school districts have incorporated Voices of Pike into their yearly curriculum. Many students in the county now submit entries as part of their regular class assignments. One high school English instructor at Phelps High School has even merged Voices of Pike with a pre-existing poetry unit she teaches in a dual credit course where students complete more vigorous coursework to earn both high school and college credit. 

Winning works are selected based on theme, originality, and quality by a blind panel of judges made up of Extension staff, educators, writers, and other community leaders. A rubric and score sheet are used by all judges. Over the past three years, we have collected almost 100 individual submissions. Including honorary mentions, we have had 19 winners across every age category. We have held two Voices of Pike community ceremonies where writers were invited to read their work, one of which occurred in collaboration with a City of Pikeville Unity Celebration.