Christopher,
The bake-offs are yearly in-house competitions against fellow Sphere members. Each one has a theme. This one is for sonnets. I think any sort of sonnet would work, but that is up to the discretion of Gail, who is filtering the entries, and Tim, who is picking his favorite 12.
Tim's choices will be put up on the Distinguished Guest. The author's name is removed, and everyone comments on the selections and usually has fun guessing who wrote what. It's not a workshop, but people do comment critically and often very pointedly.
Then we vote and the winner receives nothing. It is a lot of fun, though, even if you don't submit anything (I rarely do).
You can look back in the archives of the Distinguished Guest forum and see last year's bake-offs. Past ones have included light verse, free verse, repeated forms, children's poetry, short poems, flash fiction, and translations.
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