The South Dakota State Poetry Society has long served as a custodian of the state's literary voice, and its annual contest remains one of the more focused regional calls for work in the country. The Portrait category is deliberately circumscribed: poems must engage with people from South Dakota—whether the poet, an acquaintance, or a character whose particularity is inseparable from the state. This is not a broad-themed competition but a curatorial exercise in place-based portraiture, where the human subject and the geographic context are held in deliberate tension. The society's institutional scope is state-level, yet its standards are national in their insistence on craft and clarity. What the contest offers is not merely a prize—the guidelines do not specify a monetary award—but a juried reading by a society with a seventy-year history of publishing and promoting poetry in the region. The entry fee of $10 per category is modest and consistent with the society's nonprofit, member-driven model. Non-SDSPS members are explicitly welcomed in this category, which suggests an interest in expanding the conversation beyond the existing membership. The requirement of a third-person bio and physical mailing address indicates a traditional, print-oriented submission culture; this is not a digital-first platform but a society that still corresponds by post. The curatorial vision here is one of specificity and restraint. Poems may be of any length or style, but they must be portraits—not landscapes, not abstractions, not generalized odes. The instruction to omit the poet's name from the poem itself reinforces a blind-judging ethos, however imperfect. The demand for .doc or .docx files and separate pages for each poem signals a preference for conventional manuscript formatting. This is a contest for poets who can work within a defined frame and who understand that regional identity is not a limitation but a lens.