Chapbook Contest

2023 Flume Press Chapbook Contest Winners & Finalists

We’re excited to announce that the winner of this year’s chapbook contest is Delinquent Dreams by Tas Tobey. About his poetry collection, contest judge Alicia Mountain had this to say:

Delinquent Dreams brings readers into a reflective and confessional reckoning with manhood, sonically and imagistically alive. This chapbook is equal parts rough cheek and clean-shaven, muscle and softness, mumble and holler, benediction and doubt and knowing. Through its wholehearted and clear-eyed speaker, Delinquent Dreams makes the case that even the grown are still growing. We readers are given permission to be in process, too, with a bold, earnest voice as our companion.

Our first runner up is the series of linked stories, Museum of Memory, by Bill Capossere. Our judge describes the strengths of the manuscript:

Museum of Memory is full of surprise, tenderness, and humor. The elegant short-prose cartography of this chapbook calls to mind Calvino's Invisible Cities; it's fantastical and true all at once. Museum of Memory makes an art of description, emotional poignancy, and inventiveness. Like all good exhibitions, readers make their way through the illuminated displays and come out the other side inspired.

And our second runner up is the poetry collection, Terraces, by Arvinder Johri:

Rich with sensory detail, Terraces weaves through relational terrain with powerful lyricism. This chapbook makes room for beauty, grief, desire, and wonder to dance together— and we readers join in.

Finalists:

Some Dark Familiar, by Julia Alter
He Played with Dolls, by Luis Andrade
How to Lose Your Voice, by E.A. Midnight
Octaves, by Tyler Dunston
Reasons You Are Not Named Teacher of the Year, by Debra Daniel
Tongues of Men and Angels, by Janice Northerns
Undine, by Rachel Zavecz

Thank you to all who submitted their work to this year’s competition. It is an honor and a challenge to choose from so many stellar chapbook manuscripts. Thanks, too, to our contest judge, for reading the top ten manuscripts with such care and consideration.

Look out for Delinquent Dreams by Tas Tobey in early summer.

2023 Flume Press Chapbook Contest Guidelines

Submission period: September 1st — October 15th

We’re pleased to announce this year’s chapbook contest will be judged by Alicia Mountain, the author of Four in Hand (BOA 2023). Her debut collection, High Ground Coward (Iowa 2018), won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Guernica, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, and American Poetry Review. Mountain was a Clemens Doctoral Fellow at the University of Denver. She serves on the board of Foglifter, a LGBTQIA+ journal based in the Bay Area. Mountain lives in New York City, where she is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Writer’s Foundry MFA program at St. Joseph’s University in Brooklyn.

Guidelines:

We invite you to submit chapbook manuscripts in poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, and hybrid forms. Chapbooks, in their relative brevity, function more like concept albums or curated collections in which the manuscript shows intentionality, whether through themes, forms, and/or narrative. We’re interested in manuscripts that invite surprise, invention, and genre bending. Collaborations are welcome. Inclusion of art or images will be considered, yet the writing should be the primary focus.

Poetry: Submit between 18-25 pages

Prose: Up to 25 pages of prose (flash, long-form, novella, or a blend of genres), Please include a list of acknowledgements

—Your name and contact information should not appear anywhere in the manuscript

—Include a brief Cover Letter in the Submittable form

—A $15 entry fee must be paid at the time of submission. This money goes directly toward printing costs. We source environmentally responsible materials wherever possible.

—Manuscripts should be submitted in PDF or Microsoft Word (.doc and .docx) formats only. We recommend PDF formatting if you want to ensure that your page breaks, indentations, and other manuscript formats are as you intend.

All manuscripts will be read by the Flume Press editors. At least ten finalists will be sent to the final judge. The winner will receive $300, plus ten copies of the chapbook. Our books are handmade, so the print run will be limited.

We only accept submissions through Submittable. Work sent by any other means will not be read. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please let us know immediately if your manuscript has been accepted elsewhere.

Results will be announced in December 2023.

SUBMIT HERE

2022 Flume Press Chapbook Contest Winners & Finalists

We’re excited to announce that the winner of this year’s chapbook contest is For the Compost, by Stu Nolan. About their poetry collection José Antonio Rodríguez had this to say:

“How do you language a self into being?” asks the speaker of these poems early on and then offers the reader a courageous attempt suffused with grace. This collection, an investigation of queer identity, looks to the ever-evolving quality of the natural world as an evocative metaphor. Rich with imagery and sound, its pensive and probing voice questions the relationship between the corporeal self and identity, seeking metamorphosis and investigating its parameters. The body or, as the poet calls it here, “borrowed atoms,” dances at the center of this lovely collection.

Our first runner up is Alive, Today, Again!, by Kimberley Ramos. Our judge describes the strengths of the manuscript:

Sometimes lyric essay, sometimes prose poem, sometimes verse, this collection plays with form to imagine the histories of white and Asian that shaped the biracial speaker’s sense of place and displacement. In referencing Filipino folklore, American pop culture, and family history, the poems here reach out as both celebration and inquiry. In the penultimate poem, the speaker imagines herself fossilized and then unearthed in the distant future, thus rising above the particulars to offer the reader an expansive view of the relationship between the individual and the imagined community.

Finalists:

Snowblind, by Jackelyn Kuszel
Elegy for a Private Body, John Tobin
Fiction, by Dwayne Martine
Skyscrape, by John Sibley Williams
i want to be clear, by Bill Hollands
Floodlit, by Joyce Schmid
All Craft, All Armor, by Ralph Pennel
Promiscuous Ruin, by Sara Mithra

Semifinalists:

In Everything, by Fabián González González
Turtles Are Animals That Move With Their Homes, by Halina Duraj
A Chore Undone, by Gil Arzola
Sirens | Silence, by Kelly Martineau
On the Bus, by Daniel Rabuzzi
Come, my friends, by Marcy Rae Henry
Chokecherry, by Todd Robinson
Yearbook, by Larry Narron
Postcards to Jingyi: Moonlight Variations, by Chengru He

Thank you to all who submitted their work to this year’s competition. You made our job exquisitely challenging with so many unforgettable, engaging chapbooks. Thanks, too, to our contest judge, José Antonio Rodríguez, for reading the top ten manuscripts with such care and consideration.

Both the first place and runner-up will be published by Flume Press. Look out for these new titles in early summer.

2022 Flume Press Chapbook Contest Guidelines

Submission period: September 15th — October 31^st

We’re pleased to announce this year’s chapbook contest will be judged by José Antonio Rodríguez, a poet, memoirist, and translator, and the author of the poetry collections This American Autopsy, cited in the New York Times as “new & noteworthy;” Backlit Hour, a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize; and The Shallow End of Sleep, winner of the Bob Bush Memorial Award from the Texas Institute of Letters; and the memoir House Built on Ashes, a finalist for the PEN America Los Angeles Literary Award, the International Latino Book Award, and the Lambda Literary Award. Other awards and honors include the Discovery Award from the Writers’ League of Texas, the Founders’ Prize from RHINO and multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize. His work has appeared in numerous venues, including The New Yorker, The Missouri Review, Pleaides, The New York Times Magazine, Latin American Literature Today, and the Academy of American Poets website, among others. A Mexican immigrant and first-gen college graduate, he holds a PhD in English from Binghamton University and is associate professor at The University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley.

Guidelines:

Poetry: Submit between 18-25 pages

Prose: Up to 30 pages of prose (flash, long-form, novella, or a blend of genres), Please include a list of acknowledgements

—Your name and contact information should not appear anywhere in the manuscript

—Include a brief Cover Letter in the Submittable form

—A $15 entry fee must be paid at the time of submission. This money goes directly toward printing costs. We source environmentally responsible materials wherever possible.

All manuscripts will be read by the Flume Press editors. At least ten finalists will be sent to the final judge. The winner will receive $200, plus ten copies of the chapbook. Our books are handmade, so the print run will be limited.

Results will be announced in December 2022.

2021 Flume Press Chapbook Contest Winners & Finalists

We’re thrilled to announce Mara Beneway’s collection of linked stories, Grandma June, and Jeff Whitney’s poetry chapbook, Sixteen Stories, were selected as our winners for the 2021 Flume Press Chapbook Contest. Both authors are awarded publication and the $200 cash prize. Both titles will be available by summer of 2022.

As well, we recognize and celebrate the exceptional work of our 10 finalists:

Extended Voicemail to a Senator | Meriwether Clarke
The Archive of In-Air Incidents | Dana Kroos
Endorsements and Letters | Jeff Whitney
Mouth of the River Spitting Out the Sea | Eli Coyle
Come See About Me | John Findura
Ordinary Light/ Tell Me, Stranger | L.I. Henley & Laura Maher
SHIFT | Michelle Murphy
Six Degrees of Polypeptide | Yu-Han Chao
What We Deserve | Wendy Oleson
Herding Before There Were Shepherds | Joel Savishinsky

After our long publishing hiatus, we’re excited to witness the evolution of craft, genre exploration, and experimentation within the chapbook structure. The quality and expansiveness in this year’s submissions made for many moments of delight and admiration around our editorial table. Thanks to all who trusted us with their work. We look forward to doing it again this fall.