Portia Steele Award Organization(c)

The Portia Steele Award for Excellence in Poetry and Award for Excellence in Prose was established to continue her work with women 50 years of age and older.

She also encouraged her students to communicate through poetry. She taught that poetry was the genre of personal expression and believed that poetry was a wonderful tool with which to convey our innermost feelings. As a youth, and later as an adult, Portia enjoyed writing poetry and prose. She especially enjoyed her fellow and sister writers, seminars and contests.

Portia created and taught the Women on Writing© workshop held at the Daly City California Senior Center for more than 10 years. During that time, she taught that "less is more", and encouraged her students to follow three simple rules for good writing: edit, edit and edit.

The Excellence in Prose award continues those rules for good writing in that the writer must 'say it all' with 500 words or less.

The poetry competition is also centered on the rules Portia believed in and taught. The poet is asked to submit works no more than 1 1/2 pages in length (double spaced)

For additional information, and the specific guidelines for submission, please check the "contest" page of this website.

Thank you for your interest in our contest, and good luck!