Ocean City Writer a Winner in Wordsmith Competition

Ocean City writer Doug Otto was named a winner in the 18th annual Joyce Indik New Jersey Wordsmith Competition. 

The Wordsmith Competition accepted submissions of poems, essays, short stories and plays by New Jersey residents ages 18 and over, and Otto was one of eight poets named winners. 

Otto is a freelance writer whose commentaries have appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Palm Beach Post and The Press of Atlantic City. His column, My Turn, was read regularly in the Courier-Post special publication My Generation, with his feature articles published in South Jersey Magazine.

 A member of the Jersey Cape Writers, the Cape Cod Writing Center, and affiliated with the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poetry Festival, Doug founded the South Jersey Poetry Festival for High School Students, in cooperation with   Rowan University, and the Haddonfield Speaks Poetry and Prose Night.

Otto studied memoir writing with award-winning author Bill Roorbach (The Smallest Color, A Place on Water) and biography with USC’s Carla Kaplan (Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters.).

Otto teaches “Writing Your Life Story” and “Writing for Publication,” where he helps aspiring writers discover their path to publication. He and his wife are Ocean City residents, and his son, Matt, is a theatrical sound designer at Yale University.    

Here is Otto's contest entry:

1957

The Philco radio
high on the shelf
murmured the Adventures of Mary Trent
as steam from your iron
blasted intervals around
another shirt collar

And I,
I stood beneath your ironing boar
in a shadow
much narrower
than the one
Father cast over you