*and July, and August…

Dear Lexington Poets and Poetry Fans,

I want to start out expressing my gratitude for everyone’s participation and appreciation of our niche little project:

Thank you.

I know that doesn’t seem like much, but I genuinely mean it and want y’all to know how much it means that I am lucky enough to give folx the opportunity to share their voice, create while in an encouraging environment, and interact with other like-minded locals, ex-pats, and Lexington-oriented writers. So again:

Thank you.

Stats

As in previous years, I have some statistics about the event to share:

288 Poets

2,993 Poems

3,100 Site Visitors

179,649 Page Views

11,859 Comments

We actually had fewer registered poets this year (last year we had 299), but more poems (compared to 2,907.)

So yeah: after 10 years, the LexPoMo Writing Challenge still holds strong.

How Did You Enjoy It?

We want to know how this year’s Writing Challenge went. More importantly, we want to know how you felt about this year’s Writing Challenge, along with your feelings about the local literary community, the published anthology, and Lexington Poetry Month in general.

With that in mind, we’d love you to take this survey. (Click here to fill it out.) It should only take a couple minutes and is completely confidential.

Additional Spaces

One part of the survey is related to online communities, specifically Discord and whether or not to have a LexPoMo Discord server. If people would like that, I’d be more than helpful to accommodate the technical side of things. But I also am not personally interested in moderating and mediating conflicts within an additional online community.

While I’ve been relatively lucky that our group is so chill and hasn’t drawn the ire of anonymous hate mobs or 4ch@ń trolls, I also understand how much emotional, mental, and even physical labor is involved in maintaining a volunteer community of passionate people in vulnerable positions (since sharing your art is an inherently a vulnerable act). I don’t take that lightly and would not feel comfortable creating that sort of environment unless it were appropriately monitored and moderated with empathetic people fully committed to bettering the world around them.

So in addition to sharing your honest, anonymous feelings about the event, I would like any and all people to contact us if:

1. you already know about a well-moderated, empathetic community who would happily host an online space for next year’s LexPoMo Writing Challenge participants,
2. you would volunteer to moderate within a new Discord channel that I will create but I will not, ultimately, moderate and maintain.

If you’re interested, or have some concerns to express, please send a message through our contact form. If you have my personal email address, please use the contact form anyway, because I let my personal account build for weeks with unread emails before I purge (so you likely won’t be heard for weeks.)

For Next Year

And with that, I want to, again, thank you all. And even though it seems like a ways away, I’m excited to see what happens for next year!

Sincerely,
Bronson O’Quinn