Martin Lake is a real place, located just northeast of Minnesota’s Twin Cities, with a history going back to the most recent glacial retreat. Twelve thousand years ago, the melting ice of a frozen sea left behind thousands of lakes, large and small, for which Minnesota is well-known.  Martin Lake is one of those lakes.

While few of us have ever seen the actual Martin Lake, many of us live in places like it, if only in our minds; and, if we take a somewhat broader perspective, we all live and have always lived on the shores of ancient vanished seas, which is just another way of saying we all carry our deepest histories with us wherever we go and whoever we become.

Those histories are shared histories. We are each a part of the world we live in, and your world is connected to my world, is connected to her world, is connected to his world, and so on and on and on.

The Silver Birch Poetry Prize for Indigenous Voices 

Martin Lake Journal is honored to offer the The Silver Birch Poetry Prize for Indigenous Voices, created in 2020 to recognize the unique perspectives of North American Indigenous Peoples and their relationship to nature – past, present and future.

The prize was founded by Lynnette McIntire, CEO of the sustainability consulting firm Silver Birch, in honor of her mother Karen McIntire.

Prize: A $150 prize will be awarded to the first-place winner. Winning entry will be published in the Martin Lake Journal 2021.

Submission Requirements: Authors from all Tribal Nations in the U.S. are eligible for the award. Submissions are limited to three poems per poet. Length limit: 30 lines maximum per poem.

Submittable Entry Fee: Fees waived for the first twenty-five Tribal Nation persons who submit entries. Please enter your tribal nation in the cover letter section of the Submittable form. The fee for subsequent entries is $3 for up to three poems per poet.