Head on over to the Sign-Up page, if you haven’t already, and join our 11th consecutive Lexington Poetry Month Writing Challenge.

Don’t see badges for all the years you’ve participated? Well, we’ve finally caught up for demand and assigned them. All you need to do is go to your Dashboard and make them visible by following these instructions:

We finally added a search bar to the top of the page!

If things look broken, please clear your browser cache and refresh!

I know I’m not the only person annoyed with having to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page just to search for someone’s poems, so I finally did something about it.

You’ll also notice a “Sponsors” Section in the upper-right corner underneath the user functions:

If you’re worried that this is some corporate takeover of Lexington Poetry Month: don’t be. We’ve always listed sponsors in the footer and meant to include them somewhere else, so this is really just us finally getting it done. (However, if you would like more info about sponsorships, contact Christopher McCurry through the form on the Contact Page.)

Speaking of updates, expect several revisions in the next couple of weeks before the event. You can always see my developer change-log on the “System Updates” page. And if you experience an issue, use that same contact form to send us some feedback. It might take a few days but someone ALWAYS responds.

While the design for these new additions were technically done under the umbrella of my employer, Mediocre Creative, I’d love to give a “shout out” to Ethan Wooldridge for designing these humble features (plus a few we haven’t yet seen…) So be sure to browse his Instagram, his Behance, or some of the branding Case Studies made by Mediocre Creative.

And as always, you can support the site in myriad ways, not the least of which is donating to the Workhorse Patreon.

Now that’s enough coding for the day. Time to go write something!

– Bronson

Hey everyone,

Even with LexPoMo starting next week, we have a lot of updates and new features coming soon to the Writing Challenge website. The first one was the new design, courtesy of Mediocre Creative.

The second big update is the new Views I have for the Participants List, which includes the improved Classic View, the minimalistic Accordion View, and the more photo-focused Gallery View.

First of all, I’m extremely excited that the design firm I work for, Mediocre Creative, is sponsoring the event again this year and even had some awesome designers give the site a once-over. Take a look at the new, clean look and give a shoutout to Brittany Durham, Ethan Price, and Shawn Saylor to thank them for the help.

Since we’re opening registrations a little earlier than we expected, though, we’re going to have a few bugs. I just noticed that my profile pic got uploaded but isn’t being displayed. And I’m aware that these post pages are a little wonky at the moment. I’ll definitely get those fixed before May, but if you notice anything like that, hit us up at the Contact Page and use as many exclamation marks as you can handle.

Anyway, I’m excited for this year’s event. Every year it gets bigger and it’s such a constant reminder of the awesome people I’ve been missing by deleting my Facebook account.

Registrations are now open! If you have any issues, send us a note on our Contact Page.

Below is a press release that we sent to the presses. Feel free to copy and use however you’d like.

For immediate release.

Lexington, Kentucky. April 1, 2020. – Workhorse Writers invites the city of Lexington to join a month-long, online writing challenge. During June 2020, amateur and professional poets will participate in the Lexington Poetry Month Writing Challenge, which involves sharing poetry, group support, and the potential to be published in the yearly anthology from Workhorse. Registration opens April 13, 2020 at LexPoMo.com.

For their seventh year, Workhorse expects over 300 poets in, from, or fond of Lexington to participate in a collaborative, generative event in which they are invited to write a poem every day for the month of June. Everyone is encouraged to submit their poem publicly at LexPoMo.com and engage with other local poets through comments and social media. Last year marked the most productive year yet with 245 registered poets and over 2,200 poems submitted throughout the month of June. Anyone who submits at least 5 poems throughout the online Writing Challenge will be eligible for publication in the annual LexPoMo anthology, published by Workhorse Writers*.

In 2013, Award-Winning poet of Accents Publishing Katerina Stoykova co-founded Lexington Poetry Month with Morris Book Shop manager Hap Houlihan. On June 30th, 2013, Mayor Jim Gray officially proclaimed June as Lexington Poetry Month. Since then, the community has been encouraged to hold any events they wish using the name “Lexington Poetry Month” and the hashtag “#LexPoMo” throughout the month of June.

The LexPoMo Writing Challenge is free to participate. Anthologies are available from Workhorse Writers. If enough people support Workhorse through Patreon, all participants will be offered a free copy of the anthology.

*Some restrictions may apply. Workhorse Writers reserves the right to refuse publication of poems or poets for any reason, as per the annual terms of use. See site (lexpomo.com) for details.

Christopher McCurry wanted me to have the sign-ups open by May 1st. But because I’m re-writing a lot of the code for this year’s Writing Challenge, I accidentally opened the flood doors a few days early. Congratulations to Hugg for signing up before I had the chance!

So, instead of closing the doors, I figure’d we could just roll with it. But you have to make me a promise: if you see anything wonky, or something doesn’t work the way you’d expect, let me know. I’m going to be ironing out the bugs (that’s how metaphors work, right?) throughout the event. Plus, I’ll be introducing a few new features over the upcoming weeks.

Please send us all of your feedback by clicking here and filling out the form. And as always, feel free to spread the word and make this the best Lexington Poetry Month Writing Challenge ever!

Sincerely,

Bronson O’Quinn

Dear poets,

A new year brings new changes. Not only are we on our own website, but I’ve reconfigured how the system works so that we can take advantage of more features. While I don’t want to bore you with the specifics, I do want to share one of the more interesting additions.

Discussion Boards

photo by Malinda O’Quinn

We have added discussion boards (i.e. forums) to the site! This means that, aside from commenting on each other’s posts, you can also create threads to share your favorite poets, ask for writing feedback, or talk about off-topic things such as the best recipe for streak-free window cleaner. Obviously, moderators will be monitoring these and reserve the right to limit privileges and ban participants for any reason. But we’ve also been an ideal online community, so I’m a lot less worried than I am excited to learn more about the poets I’ve been writing with for the past four years.

Technical Issues

As I hinted at, I’ve changed a lot of things beneath the surface, so if you see any errors, let me know. Click here to go to the contact page and send me your issues. Try to describe what was happening so that I can troubleshoot the problem. And I will do my best to get back to you within a couple weekdays. Currently, I’m the only one who understands the code that I’ve written for this thing, but I’ll be sharing that knowledge with other members of Workhorse and Accents Publishing.

Aside from that, thank you so much for signing up, and I can’t wait to see some poetry!

Sincerely,

Bronson O’Quinn