To everyone who entered the 2023 Glover Awards,

This was a record-breaking year. We had more entries (a lot more), more judges, we added the new instrumental category, and we gave away over eight times the amount of prize money we gave in 2022, including cash prizes for Honorable Mention.*

*This was made possible in part by the generous contribution of Sharon Griffith Turrentine.

This year the Glovers grew from a small local song contest to a national competition that allowed amateur and first time writers to compete with professional artists who have recording contracts and millions of streams.

We’re glad you were part of the Glover Awards this year, and we want you to stay with us. To give you an incentive to keep writing great songs, we plan to raise more money for prizes, add more genre categories, and look for more ways to promote your music. Creating music is an amazing thing, and it shouldn’t go unrewarded.

In the next weeks and months, we’ll be posting profiles of our winning writers and, of course, their songs. We’ll also post news and updates about them and their music. For now, here are the results of the 2023 Glover Awards for Songwriting.

Songs With Words

1ST PLACE: Morgan Smith (recording as Telewaves), “True Meaning”

2ND PLACE: Brooke Martin, “Black Mirror”

Instrumental Songs

1ST PLACE: Travis Bowman, “Uptown”

2ND PLACE: Adams Collins, “Airbender”

Honorable Mentions

(In alphabetical order)

Brooke Martin, “Love Me Not”

Ethan Bush, “For All She Knows”

The Intemperate Sons, “Way Back When”

Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster, “No Tongue Can Tell”

Mark Ham (pic) and Gary Cirimelli, “Bad and Good”

Ryan Cassata, “Hold On, You Belong (People Like Us)”

Our video page has performances and interviews by our winners, plus here’s a Spotify playlist of our winning songs. Some of the songs aren’t on Spotify, so I picked other tracks by the writers as stand-ins.

Thank you for being part of the 2023 Glovers. Thanks for believing in us. Thanks for being patient as we adjust to crazy growth. Whether or not you finished in the money, please enter again. You’re the reason this is working. Let’s grow together.

Chuck Dodson
Chair, Glover Awards