User:Crunchydillpickle/sandbox/World Palindrome Championship

The World Palindrome Championship is a palindrome writing competition that began in 2012.

History
The first World Palindrome Championship was held March 2012 at the Marriott ballroom in Brooklyn, New York, where about 700 audience members watched. The host was Will Shortz, editor of The New York Times Crossword editor. For the finals, the seven competitors were ordered to choose one of three prompts — a palindrome with the letters x and z, write a palindrome about a person who was in the news in the past year, or a palindrome about this competition. Competitors had 75 minutes to write up to three palindromes offstage with 75 minutes, and could use their own materials. Saltveit, who went on to win the competition, flipped through his handmade 200-page dictionary filled with 29,000 palindrome fragments. When the finalists returned to the stage to read their creations, the audience voted using palindromic signs that read "HUH?" on one side and "WOW!" on the other side. Competitors included Jon Agee, writer of palindrome books for children, and Mark Saltveit, a Portland-area stand up comedian and editor of the Palindromist magazine.

The winner was Portland-based stand up comedian Mark Saltveit, whose exciting palindrome “Devil Kay fixes trapeze part; sex if yak lived" beat the political one by biostats professor John Connett: "Not Newt! Ron's snort went on" by four votes. Mark Saltveit received a cardboard trophy made by Jon Agee, which dramatically folded down to reveal it was a symmetrical trophy. “Sadly, at the reception after the awards... I put the trophy against a wall, and it was stolen and is now undoubtedly displayed in a private collection next to stolen Van Goghs and Picassos. Or a janitor may have thrown it away, but I prefer the first scenario," Saltveit said to Harvard Magazine.